Speaker 1everyone at any level, whether it's professional or personal, whether you're a freelancer and even being a freelancer, essentially what that is, it's your own business. You have all that responsibility on your shoulders and there's often no one to ask, but that's where a lot of people go wrong. You're meant to ask. Welcome to the Profitable Graphic Designer podcast.
Speaker 2My name is Katie Sandel and this episode was brought to you by Aventive Academy, an online business education platform that helps brand graphic and web designers get more clients, increase their pricing and build a profitable design business. We have online programs, courses and templates that you can use and you can find out more about starting and growing your firm. Join the freelance design business at AventiveAcademy.com. Hello and welcome to the Profitable Graphic Designer podcast. First of all, why don't you introduce yourself and let our audience know who you are, what you do and who you
Speaker 1help. Hi, Katie. Thanks for having me, first of all. Well, I'm Prejan. I'm the CTO of Grayline Medias. So my name is Prejan and I'm the CTO of Grayline Medias. and Yeah, absolutely. So there's been a lot of support I've had.
Speaker 2Yeah, that's amazing. And I've had so many mentors as well. Either those are paid mentors that I hired or even just someone who I find on YouTube and find their content valuable because those people are your mentors too. Absolutely. So as mentioned, our listeners today are freelance graphic brand and web designers, mostly. So why should a freelancer think about working with a mentor, especially when they're already juggling the other parts of their business?
Speaker 1Absolutely. How can a mentor help them? So the whole point of it is that they're juggling so much. I mean, they're juggling so much plausibly because, hey, maybe they need to streamline their process. Maybe they. I know, for example, when I was freelancing as an individual, there were some questions I had. I needed answers to. How do you deal with a difficult client? Those aren't things you learn. Those are experiences you go through and experience that can be shared. How do you perform well on a sales call? These are things that you really need some sort of engagement for. And there are different forms of it. I mean, you can gain it through experience or it's knowledge sharing. So it's essentially like everyone at any level, whether it's professional or personal, whether you're a freelancer. And even being a freelancer, essentially what that is, it's your own business. You have all that responsibility on your shoulders and there's often no one to ask. But that's where a lot of people go wrong. You're meant to ask. You're meant to, whether it's formal and you reach out to a business coach, which can accelerate your career greatly, or it's slightly informal and you join communities, you must engage your community. You must engage people. You must engage people smarter than you. Simon Sinek says, be the idiot in the room. So, you know, embrace your idiot, reach out to smarter people and you'll see yourself grow at any level.
Speaker 2Yeah, I love that. Thank you so much for mentioning that. I actually remember hearing that a few years ago because I was always afraid of asking because I thought, oh, they will think I'm stupid. They will, you know, not see me as professional as I should look like because I used to go for a lot of networking events. And then instead of asking, hey, where are other networking events? I would Google and never find them. It's just an example. But still, like, why wouldn't I ask? I was embarrassed to ask because I thought that they will not see me as professional or they'll think I'm stupid or something. It's just, it's stupid to think like that.
Speaker 1It's never be ashamed. I mean, to be the dumbest or the smartest person. Because you always want to grow. You're never at a stage where you're the perfect graphic designer or web developer. And if you reach that point mentally, you stagnate and the world will go ahead.
Speaker 2Yes, definitely. So if a freelance designer or anyone who's listening to this podcast decides they are interested in having a mentor, where should they start looking for one? Should they just start Googling or go to one of the platforms like Upwork or Fiverr? Or ask a friend or go for a networking event? Like, where do you find a mentor?
Speaker 1I think what you need to ask yourself before where is why. Like, for you as an individual. Because like I said, it's not one size fits all. You need to know what you want out of mentorship. Because that's what mentors want to know as well. I mean, it's a relationship. It's not a one-way thing. Whether you're paying for it or not, it's an exchange. Of some sort of information. You need to know. So if you're a graphics designer and you're like, hey, I need to be better at sales. You have defined that, hey, that's my weakness. I need a sales coach. You reach out to a community. So once you've identified your why, it's much easier to kind of search for that community. Because there are hundreds of platforms out there. I mean, just LinkedIn in itself is such a powerful platform. There's a huge network of people. And whether it's other communities, you had mentioned you were on in the future. You could possibly reach out there. And there are several other groups. But it's figure out your why. And the way I did it was as rudimentary as creating an Excel sheet with a title. And at the time, I wanted to understand more about operations and specifically agile. So who's going to be my agile coach? And I searched for the people who I respected the most. I watched their content. I understood their why. So and then number, like, I wanted to know what I could offer them. Because I hate going to any relationship being the person who's I need, I need, I need, or I want, I want, I want. It's like, hey, I loved your content. You've done some amazing things. You know, I'd love for you to be my mentor or share some information with me. This is what I can offer you. And that's. That's how I, how, whatever platform, that's how you should approach it.
Speaker 2Yeah. You talk about this so passionately. Are you a mentor at the moment? And would you like to be one?
Speaker 1So in many ways, I've had such great mentors in my life. I want to be able to share information with people. And that's why I started Automate Repetitive Tasks. Essentially, I want to, I want to teach people how to make their lives easier because I, I want to teach people how to make their lives easier. I want to make my life easier. I have been making my life easier and something I've realized. And I think you realize from people who, who are not necessarily older, but maybe more experienced is that time, time is valuable and we need to, we need to kind of embrace that our lives are, is work and also there are different components. So, yeah, so I do, I definitely do want to reach out to more people and help them out for their lives. So, yeah, I do want to reach out to more people and help them out for their lives. or you fail projects, you build yourself up. And that even. are doing that with our business now we we always have a retrospective and we're like hey let's let's put down the brakes for a bit we need to get this right and um acknowledge the mistakes that we make and appreciate okay we made this why did we make it how do we improve pause breathe and then go ahead so yeah yeah i
Speaker 2started having that definitely and now once a week it's usually mondays or fridays are where i set a couple of hours to decide and just step back close all my browsers close all my emails like everything and just think are we doing are we going in the right direction are we doing this right what are the mistakes we made how can we fix them and it's kind of fun i mean it's fun looking at your mistakes and you're like how did i do that okay never mind let's move on
Speaker 1absolutely but you
Speaker 2learn so much from them you i would never learn all the things if i haven't made those mistakes that taught me how to do it
Speaker 1right absolutely absolutely and go ahead yeah no exactly it's it's about it's it's a humbling experience to be able to be like hey i don't need to be right always hey i do make mistakes and you kind of look back and like oh how could i how could i have done that to appreciate it and you grow from it yeah definitely
Speaker 2another thing that i wanted to mention is that a lot of graphic designers or you know web designers brand designers any designers they it's not making a mistake but they think that by improving their design skills they're going to grow their business and then they're constantly improving their logos improving their websites and learning new software which is fine it's great and you need to do that but then they put marketing advertising promotions sales and anything business related even like structuring their business and how are they going to grow their team i mean you know you just grew your team in the last two years to 15 members so it's kind of like and then they put that on the side and then they don't see the growth because they're focused on not necessarily the wrong thing but they're focused too much on improving their skills instead of finding the right mentor someone who's going to help them grow
Speaker 1the business i mean again that's that's that's a bit of like prioritization because yeah being a business owner is juggling like a hundred things at one time and unless you which is very difficult when you're experiencing it it is very difficult to prioritize hey this is top priority two three four five sometimes you need that external member to be like hey you're you make great designs you don't necessarily need a new website every month you need to fix your messaging you need to fix your business you need to fix your storytelling like how are you engaging with your users it doesn't matter how good you are if no one's coming and knocking at your door you know so it's it's that prioritization it's that different opinion that different viewpoint that you know that guidance that really can help
Speaker 2yeah definitely also there are so many mastermind groups that helped me in the past for example a i was a i think it was like five business owners in one group and actually that was like i'm saying two years ago but like five six years ago and my question was how to get more clients and the feedback was okay how many more clients like would you like to have it i'm like well let's say two a month and they asked me do you think you would be able to provide quality services to all you know whatever clients it is per month and i'm like well i don't know well i can probably work on saturday too and long story short i got to that that i'm like no i don't need more clients i need higher paying clients you know and i didn't see that i was constantly how do i get more how do i get more maybe i need to connect with more people on linkedin maybe go for more networking events and i get that when you're starting out you don't have any clients you need to get more but you also need to think about getting better clients however i wouldn't get to that point to that realization unless i had those people who were kind of my mentors
Speaker 1absolutely yeah absolutely and it's it's that perspective a different perspective that gave you the opportunity and let's say maybe you did not have that conversation and you were working monday to sunday because you got those extra two clients you gave yourself time to spend with your family and do the things you love maybe because you had the opportunity to speak
Speaker 2to someone yeah definitely yeah okay so once you have a mentor like how does that relationship typically work for you for example like do you meet over zoom or in person and how often like how much should you actually interact with your mentor and should you interact with mentors at all because we just talked about having mentors that we see them as mentors but they just post on youtube so i
Speaker 1guess i would say i would say that i would say that i would say that i guess yeah that there are a lot of logistic issues as well i mean so now we're in a world where we can do a lot of it digitally although it would be lovely to sit with someone and have a coffee and have that personal interaction it's not always feasible so yeah having having digital calls works i mean you share your stories and the whole world is moving that way but in terms of how often so i guess one thing we need to think about is how often do we need to interact with people to kind of differentiate is like a mentor and a coach generally speaking a mentor is not as formal in the sense that it's kind of someone who's experienced who you meet once a quarter once in six months and it's kind of like that guidance someone who provides you a little bit of guidance it's not a formal engagement like a coach who might be meeting you once a week and kind of reviewing everything you do yeah it's it's a different sort of relationship your coach is trying to catalyze your growth he is dedicated he or she is dedicated to working with you and yeah it generally speaking once a week or bi-weekly people do coaching calls for very busy individuals yeah a month works so there's there's no one-size-fits-all again but essentially it's what works for you and it what makes sense for the relationship there's no point meeting every week if you are not getting anything out of it you want to give yourself enough time to progress to ponder on the advice to actually implement something before going back and you know not having much to contribute either yeah
Speaker 2exactly i was just about to say because it does take time to implement something if someone is let's say helping you fix your portfolio there is no need to meet once a week you can still do much in one week in terms of you know developing something that's really valuable and that looks really good in your portfolio so you know maybe once in two weeks but then if you're working on messaging and on email marketing then maybe once a week would be better so it kind of depends on what is that that you need to get
Speaker 1done absolutely and um i think that's very important to kind of define initially what your expectations are what you want out of the relationship i've seen a lot of relationships not working out just because there was no communication i mean there are two great people who who want to grow and do better but they've not really defined their goals and what they want out of each other so that's something especially when you reach out to a more formal sort of a coach let them know like what you want how you feel how you want to go about it and then you know what you're going to do and then you know what you're going to do and be respectful and work with them to
Speaker 2get there yeah definitely like that so do you have any last tips or thoughts on how freelancers can find and choose the right mentor for their business
Speaker 1absolutely i think focus on yourself focus on your why focus on what you truly need in your business and not all freelancers may need coaches there are people who are doing just fine but if you feel like you're doing too much you're working too hard or something is falling through the cracks you probably need to talk to someone whether again a mentor or a coach you and once you figure out what you need it's a matter of finding the people you respect and who have similar values to you and you probably already know that person like you probably know the youtube video that you love and you'll probably find people from their community who who have the same mindset who you can reach out to so um don't be afraid be fearless approach everyone i mean be okay like rejection is amazing like get rejected a hundred times because the one time you get a success you you'll be with a great person and you'll get what you want but basically be be fearless and go out there and you'll find your mentor to help you grow
Speaker 2yeah well thank you so much for joining me today where can our listeners connect with you online like your website social media and anywhere else you might be
Speaker 1yeah absolutely i mean So you can check out my media agency at graylinemedia.com and my personal business process consulting site, which I'm going to launch very soon and will be probably live by the time this is live. And that is automaterepetitivetasks.com, art, so make it an art. Yeah, so those are the two places you can probably contact me or even on LinkedIn. So just my name and I'd be happy to talk to anyone on a Zoom call, meet over a coffee and share advice and get advice from you.
Speaker 2Perfect. Well, thank you so much. And I can't wait for this episode to go live.
Speaker 1Thank you, Katie. It's been a pleasure.
Speaker 2Yeah, thank you. Bye. Thank you for joining us today on the Profitable Graphic Designer. In addition to this podcast, we have created some amazing online courses. To help you set up your business, get more clients and scale to the income level you desire. If you need help developing your freelance portfolio so it stands out. If you want to learn how to create proposals, new clients will say yes to. If you're still trying to figure out how much to charge for your services. And if becoming the go-to designer for your dream client is your goal this year, then I invite you to enroll in my signature 12-week program, The Profitable Designer, or one of our other specialties. To learn more about the programs and get started, visit AventiveAcademy.com. See you next time.
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