041: October Bonus Episode! (Losing a client)

BONUS EPISODE!!!!

For the first time in my freelance career I lost a client! Tune in to hear why, how I'm coping, and most importantly: what comes next.

I do mention the RD Entrepreneur symposium at the end of this episode.

If you are at all interested in attending please consider using my affiliate link. The early bird rate is ON right now and you save $200, get access to 26 speakers, and 27.75 CEUS. 

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Transcript

Julia: 0:00

Hey, and welcome to the Freelance dietitian Podcast, a show that teaches you how freelancing can help you meet your financial goals while giving you space to unplug and enjoy your life. I'm your host, Julia z Shefsky, a published freelance writer, and this is a bonus episode. Welcome. It's Friday morning. I am recording basically live, cause I am gonna be publishing this within the next half hour. I wanted touch base with you guys cuz I've had a few changes in my business and the show was all about education and transparency and I wanted to come on and tell you what's been going on. So I was all queued up to sign an extension of a contract I had with one of my biggest. Literally, they were just waiting for me to sign it. And then within a 24-hour period it got flopped on its head and they decided to let me go. It wasn't anything personal, no issues or drama happened, it was very professional. It was just a shift in direction of the type of tonality and messaging they wanted for their writing. They did. Didn't necessarily feel that my style was the best fit moving forward, and that's how it goes sometimes with freelance writing. I would say actually a lot of times. At the end of the. Writing is a creative pursuit and there's always gonna be a degree of subjectivity. So if they have a different vision, I can only do what I know how to do. And I tried to adapt of course, but it just didn't make the cut and it sucked. I'm not gonna lie. It really threw me for a loop because we had just been talking about renewing the contract and then boom, overnight. It was just a change of change of narrative. That is a big lesson I learned early on in my freelance career. Honestly, guys, nothing is official until the ink on the contract has dried. That is something I always remind myself. So even now when I do pitch to new people and there seems to be a good rapport and response coming back, I'm always excited, but I do keep a little bit of a guard up because I know that until we both sign a contract, it's just. So keep that in mind. I think it helps to manage your expectations so that you don't get to emotionally invested, because I have done that and it fell through and I just felt so devastated. And then it just takes longer to bounce back and it's just such a roller coaster. The immediate things on my mind after, uh, losing that contract was of course money. It was the fiscal responsibilities that we have as a family and just feeling like, how am I gonna make ends meet? That was my knee jerk thought. And past, Julia was very clever, and I do have other sources of revenue coming into my business that are not tied down to freelance projects, and I've built them up so that they will always cover my bare necessities. So that's gonna be my mortgage, grocery money, and just other monthly expenses that are recurring. That's a good way to do it, to make sure that you cover your bases. I think without that kind of, uh, like base fee that I'm getting every single month, I would be very, it would be a very different Julia behind this microphone today, because that would be very scary. That's so part of entrepreneurship as well, and I'm really trying to have this. Experience, like taking it with a grain of salt and being kinder to myself because I am realizing that I am being so hard on myself. The narrative in my head at like two in the morning when the brain is doing its own mission, is so vicious sometimes and it just is picking me apart. And I have to really do a lot of mental work to boost myself up, do that exercise I was just talking about a couple episodes that Keith showed me, where I look at the concrete facts instead of letting this emotional wind dictate what my mood will be in for that. So yeah, I am coming here this Friday, pretty composed, but the last couple days I haven't been, and it's been really hard. Entrepreneurship is not easy, and if it was, everyone would be doing it.

4:14

Recognize also that there will always be setbacks in your business. The only thing that you really have complete control over is how you react and how you pick yourself back up together and put yourself back out there. Truly, the only bad thing you can do in these scenarios is quit. That would be such a devastating step for yourself for your dreams. And I know it can feel tempting to want to throw the towel in when things get hard, but you just have to white knuckle it. Hang on and keep going. I gave myself a 24 hour wallow period just because I felt like I needed it. Uh, and it did drag on a couple of days and I just watched TV shows and I ordered takeout and I just totally lived in my For a bit. And then I did some really healthy practices, which was, I reached out to a friend and I told them, Hey, I'm really struggling and I need to reach out to you otherwise, I'm very worried. I'll just keep wallowing. And that was super helpful. I reached out to family and I personally find strength out of my support network from my loved ones and not really helped remind myself of what I'm capable of. So absolutely take your moment to grieve the loss in your business. Process that emotions, but always remember that you have to keep going.

Julia: 5:35

My next steps moving forward are gonna be revamping my website and my portfolio, and I'm choosing to look at this as a great opportunity to really revamp how I am presenting my business to the digital space. So I was using Wix primarily for my website and it's just, it's so expensive. They're raising their rates again, which I think is ludicrous cause they're not adding any more value. And I just decided to let it go. Like, forget it. I'm not gonna pay all that money for a website that I don't even actively use. Because a lot of freelance writers are on LinkedIn, some of them are on Twitter, and then some of them are on Instagram. So I invested in Canva Pro because they launched a new web design feature. So you get to have a one page website with multiple sections and you just keep scrolling down. I think it's the best if you are gonna be having a business that's very portfolio forward because they can just visibly see everything they wanna see. And I do plan to move into, Videography space as well, because video content is the future, and I think Canva has a really fast user system, so the videos load instantly I did have to invest in Canva Pro, which is half the price of what Wix would've charged me. And on top of the website design, I also will have access to all the other features that come with Canva Pro. I'm not a Canva Pro, uh, sponsor person or affiliate. I'm just letting you guys know from my research that's why I decide to go that direction. I'm also gonna be presenting at the r d Entrepreneur Symposium, which is towards the end of October. I'll put a link to it. It is an affiliate link, so if you do choose to sign up, I will. A little baby commission from it. When I was in clinical dietetics, I found the RD symposium cause it's the only one of its kind online. And I signed up right away for the early bird rate, which is 200 bucks less on the full price. And I loved it. It was 25 different RD speakers who are in different areas of entrepre. The presentations were great. It was so inspiring, and I still think about it to this day, and I still refer to some of the handouts that I saved from the presentation. So now I get to teach at it, and I'm actually doing a topic about podcasting, specifically why your business should start a podcast, because it is in its juvenile stages and it is the most underutilized marketing tool for all businesses at this point in time. There's approximately. 60 million blogs on the internet and there's 2 million podcasts. So it is untapped. It's just ripe for the picking. So if you guys are at all interested, please consider signing up. I'm getting a bit rambly here, so I think it's time to wrap up. I hope at the end of this podcast you feel rooted and confident that no matter what hurdles come your way, you can handle. I hope you guys have a great week. I will be back next Tuesday. Danielle Ryan is coming on the show. She's a Canadian business coach. She's not a dietitian, I discovered her on TikTok and she's just so. Cool and mellow, and she was a yoga instructor and that was her business, and now she's transferred over into the TikTok realm and brand work, and I think it's gonna be a really great episode and give you a taste about the modern possibilities for online business owners. Alrighty, have a great week. I'll see you next Tuesday. Bye.