Feeling Overwhelmed?

Hello and welcome to another episode of Freelance to Founder where we help you start freelancing, grow your agency and live the work life you've always wanted. You can send in your questions at Freelance2Founder.com/ask. I'm Preston, I started Freelancing in college and from there I've built, grown or sold a few successful businesses of my own and together with my guest co-hosts I'm ready to help you do the same. If you're ready to grow your service-based business into something bigger, if you're ready to become a founder, well this show is for you and we're here every week to answering your questions. Today I'm joined by my new friend, Amy Sudo, she's the creator of the best selling substack, make writing your job as well as an author and a freelance writer and you welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me, Preston, it was great to be here. I'm excited to chat with you, we're going to have you for a few episodes so I'll thank you in advance for that and listeners, make sure you tune back in, you know the next few episodes to hear, mine and Amy's conversations. I want to quickly though, let the listeners know who you are, maybe why they ought to stick around and listen to you and me for the next little while or for the next few episodes. Why don't you just quickly let the listeners know who you are and what you're working on. Yeah, so I am a freelance writer, I recently grew my freelance writing business to seven figures, I specialize in memoir ghost writing and my upcoming book right for money and power shares how to build a seven figure freelance writing business, also integrating how to build a substack and a self published book business because I do think that to be a successful writer there's different pieces that you can build concurrently. And in terms of my background, I started out in Hollywood as a TV writer before jumping into the world of freelancing, memoir ghost writing, I traveled the world for five years and during that time I was just a full-time writer working with my laptop, you know, enjoying the views from Greece and Turkey and Singapore and working with clients who are also based all over the world. Very, very cool. Where was your favorite place? I love to travel. I haven't been as many places as I would like to, but where, where was your favorite place to live and work from? Istanbul was amazing for the Turkish breakfast. I'm just a sucker for a good breakfast and in Europe they don't really take breakfast seriously until you get to Istanbul and then you just have dozens of these beautiful little plates of the Turkish breakfast and it's just gorgeous and the Turkish coffee destroyed me. I actually had to quit coffee for an entire year after drinking a month's worth of Turkish coffee, so enter at your own risk with that. I love that. Well, I think probably not on today's episode, but on one of the episodes that we're going to do together, I would actually love, I need to find a question or maybe we can just chat about AI and writing because to hear to hear someone say, amidst everything that's happening in AI because I think writing took the earliest and maybe biggest hit in terms of freelance work and freelancers who were affected by AI. To hear someone say like, you know, in the midst of that and despite that, I have built a successful freelance writing business. I would love to pick your brain about that a little bit more because I think a lot of our listeners would be interested to know whether their writers are not. I mean, I think AI is affecting every single, particularly, you know, we have a lot of listeners who work in creative spaces and AI is just really, I think, scaring a lot of people. So we'll have to have that conversation. There's little teaser, maybe next episode or the one after, we'll have to just chat a little bit about how you've positioned your business so that AI maybe doesn't take a big chunk out of it. But for today, we've got a question from Jonas. And Jonas wrote in, he says, "Everyone talks about systems, but I just don't know where to start. First, process I should do as a solo business owner to automate and save time and mental energy." Do you have any thoughts for Jonas as he asks about systems and processes and where to even get started with that? That can be, that can seem overwhelming when you're, when you're just a solo freelancer to begin with. Yeah. When it comes to systems and processes, this is kind of the lifeblood of us solo freelancers, founders. And I think that the best way that I started to actually understand how to automate was by doing a time audit. I swear by using this time tracking tool called toggle, which you can attach to your browser. And you just turn on whatever you're working. You can change from between different types of tests and things like that. And so for the last three years, I've been religiously tracking my time. And that has helped immensely when I look back at my schedule every week and look at what I actually spent that time doing. And from there, I was able to identify like, "Oh, these are things that I can automate. These are things that I can outsource." And when it comes to freelancers, there's only certain parts of the process that you can outsource when it comes to the solo freelance model versus like an agency model. And so you really have to kind of think about like, what are things that I could pay somebody an hourly rate to do that would still make sense with my margins. And so every type of freelancer is different for my field. I do long form memorego shredding. So one thing that really helps me is hiring in an outside proofreader to help to proofread work. And so there's different pieces of every business that you can automate. But I think that because everybody's so unique, I think starting with that time audit really helps. And then from there, first asking, is there a software tool or AI tool that can help me with this? And if the answer is no, then it's trying to think about what type of person could I hire for this and at what rate to still protect my margins. I love that. What has been your experience? So as you've, you know, you brought up an important point, you probably in your business do most of the writing and you have to stay involved in that. And as much as you're a solo freelancer and not an agency. So what kind of things do you outsource if it's not the direct creative work? Or if I'm misunderstanding that, you can correct me as well. Yeah. So one of the things that I think is really helpful that a lot of freelancers don't think about, especially writers and creative freelancers is the marketing component of your business. How do people find you? And one of the early investments that I made early on in my freelancing business was a complete website redesign with an emphasis on SEO. And so I hired professionals who were web designers to completely redo my blog and create a custom website for me. And then I also hired people with special knowledge and SEO to create my Google site map and other things that even though I've been blogging for like a decade, I just had it. I didn't have this. And so being able to have those professionals come in and help me with that ended up just exploding my business because when people are searching on Google or even searching using AI tools, they have this bias that if they find you on Google or they find you on an AI tool, then they're more likely to hire you because they have this bias that I found you. So therefore, you must be, you must be good because I made this choice to hire you versus you trying to do outreach to people. So really kind of thinking about that inbound traffic of how people find you and outsourcing the elements of whether like, you know, whether that's hiring an SEO expert or a website designer, I know some freelancers who even hire ghost writers to run their blog for them when it comes to client-focused content. And so it kind of just depends on like what is going to be the lever that's going to move your business the most and attract those clients. I think that that end portion was really important. What's going to move the needle in your business? Because I think so often we can say like, oh, I spent so much time doing XYZ, but is that really something that's moving the business forward or is that just something that you don't enjoy doing or that's taking up your time? I would add like one question, you said, you said in the process, you say like, okay, what am I spending a lot of time doing? And then is there a software that can do that instead? And then is there a person that could do that? And I would maybe add one more question if I can, Amy, and that is like in between what am I spending a lot of time doing and is there software that could solve that problem? I think there's an important question to be asked, which is does this actually need to be done? Because when we start, especially those of us who are creative, you know, we start off just like doing creative work for clients and we kind of just are in there doing the work just figuring it out as we go. And as opposed to like sitting down and going, okay, here are the key, here are the critical tasks I need to do to grow my business. We're just sort of like a lot of us bootstrapping it and figuring it out. And we don't stop to think at some point, this thing I've always done, do I actually need to do that? So I'd love, unfortunately, we have to take a quick break. We have to hear from our sponsors, not unfortunately. We're grateful for our sponsors, listeners, thank you for supporting them. But I'm excited to hear your response, Amy, to this question of just like what kinds of things maybe could we just cut out entirely when it comes to our systems and processes? Before we go and build a whole process for it, could we just cut it out and I'd be interested to hear what kind of things you've cut out or what you recommend. Other freelancers trying to grow their business cut out, we'll be right back. 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But before the break, I was talking about this maybe missing question, which is like, does this need automated in the first place? Should this even, should I be spending time on this? Does this even need done? Does that ring a bell for you or ring true for you at all, Amy? Yeah, one of the concepts that I talk a lot about in order to help freelancers prevent burnout is this idea of time management versus energy management. When I was a new freelancer, I was just running myself ragged, just trying to stuff as much in my work day as possible without realizing that certain tasks were draining my energy more than others and certain types of clients and projects were draining my energy more than others. And this kind of came at an inflection point in my career where I had kind of split myself between working as a freelancer in the book world. And then I was also doing copywriting and content writing, ghost writing and assignments. And so I just felt myself completely burnt out. I was stretched to thin across different types of tasks and different types of projects. And the mental load was too difficult. So for me, once I eliminated the copywriting and content projects, despite the fact that that was a huge part of my revenue and instead focused on fewer higher paying clients in the book world only, that helped a lot. And that also allowed me a better view of my week when it comes to what am I actually doing in a week, what am I prioritizing, what's necessary. And when you reduce the task switching and the even client switching and kind of have fewer higher paying clients in similar and the similar niche, that can help a lot. And then the task gets simpler, the marketing gets simpler because you're just talking to one type of client. And then the activities that you need to do to land clients or have clients become your referral partners become a lot simpler when you're working on fewer types of assignments as well. Excellent. I want to come back to Jonas's question here before we wrap up this episode. And I will say as a quick little teaser, this idea of what you just covered, like juggling, you know, all the different types of projects, client work, but then also the marketing, the admin stuff. We actually have a question from Malik coming in a couple of episodes. And I think Amy, you and I will tackle that. So our little teaser there for our listeners, we got now a couple episodes. We tease you on. So stay tuned. Keep listening. And Amy and I'll be back, but I, but I want to make sure we do Jonas justice here. So he said, what's the first process a solo business owner should automate any earlier in the show? You said marketing. I agree with that. Absolutely. Maybe lump in with marketing sales, right, just like revenue, driving activities for the business, activities that get new clients and new customers. I would also add all things to do with the processing of payments. So like you should be doing the work really well and in my opinion and, and someone else should be crafting an invoice, sending an invoice, following up on an invoice, recording an invoice when it gets paid. All of those things, like all of that, like accounts, payable kind of stuff that a corporate place would do, just hire someone to do that for an hour or two a week. It can even, yeah, it can just be a contractor. Someone part time that can take two, three, maybe even five hours a week depending on how much you need. And then you don't have to worry about it. But, you know, a lot of freelancers or agency builders don't get paid because they don't have time or don't make the time to chase down invoices and process those correctly. And it can create a lot of problems. So that would be another one. Is there any other that come to mind for you, Amy? You know, early on processes that he could, he could outsource or automate? Yeah, definitely. I think that the bookkeeper is huge. I've hired a bookkeeper from day one of my business because I think that even just the simplicity of like, oh, categorizing transactions, it is something that it just ended up like piling on my plate and just creating a mental load that burned me out. So I think it is worth it to hire a bookkeeper or some sort of accountant support when it comes to those more menial tasks and invoices. And so, and I think that a lot actually can be done with automation. One thing that I think can be done pretty easily is contract automation in terms of using certain tools. But it makes it easy for you to input the statement of work and things like that. And so I've used different automation tools like Honeybook was really good when I was juggling a lot of like copyright and clients. I use Dropbox Sign and now I'm kind of using the Google Suite for for different contract automation. So I'm trying to figure out like the flow of onboarding a client because that's what you're going to be doing the most of in the beginning of your freelancing career. What are all of the things that you have to do that you can automate? I think Calamly is a great tool for booking discovery calls, so you don't have to manually schedule every single discovery call, especially because you're going to be taking a lot more discovery calls in the beginning of your career. And so I think that a lot of that automation of like the outsourcing can be done to these tools for with these tools that are very simple and fairly, fairly low cost, especially because of the amount of time they're going to buy back for you. I love that. I've used a lot of those tools as well. You know, fresh books is one that does really well quick books does like sort of a, I think a lot of them have this feature now where they use like an AI thing to sort of pre-categorize and then you just confirm categories. I think that helps. But yeah, there's a lot of really sophisticated tools out there. I find myself gravitating more and more toward and of course none of these people are sponsors but gravitating more and more towards the Google suite as well. Because now they've got, you can do just like a simple Google doc, but you can add like contract features where they can sign. And they have a calendar type of feature where you can set up, you know, calendar appointments in certain time blocks and people join. And so it's kind of cool. It's all coming together. Some people might think that's awful, but you know, I just find myself gravitating there because I'm already in that ecosystem. Anything else you'd add for Jonas before we wrap up this episode? I think that that covers everything, but I think that the time audit will kind of help you see what's helpful. Another thing that I like to do when I'm looking back at the week of tasks and what I've spent time on is add a plus or a minus on things that either give me energy or take away energy. Because the gold standard is that if you can outsource something that both takes away energy and is also affordable to outsource. So trying to think about what are the low-hanging fruit on your calendar of things you already don't want to do that you can fairly affordably outsource or automate with a tool or hiring somebody to help you with. Excellent. Jonas, we hope that has been helpful. We really wish you the best of luck, your early stages of the business. And those systems, those processes can make or break your business. So yeah, be I'm glad you're being mindful about it. Give some things some try and some of the things we've advised you today. You're not going to get a perfect right the first time and that's okay. We wish you the very, very best. Amy, thank you so much for joining this episode. We just quickly let listeners know where they can connect with you. Yeah. So my upcoming book right for money and power can be pre-ordered at amy sudo.com/power. You can subscribe to our writing job board at makewritingyourjob.com. And then we also have a marketing job board. We just launched at make marketingyourjob.com with freelance opportunities in different spaces. But thank you so much for having me, Preston. Absolutely. We'll be sure to link to all of that stuff in the show notes. Thank you so much for being here. And to you, the listeners. Thank you for listening to this episode of freelance defender. Remember, you can submit your questions at freelance2founder.com/ask. You can also catch up on past episodes right there on the website freelance2founder.com. The theme music for this episode and all our episodes comes from our friend Hawkeen Karud. It's a song called Road Trip. We're grateful for that. And I've been Preston Lee. You've been listening to me and Amy answer Jonas's question on today's episode and we'll catch you next time on freelance2founder. See ya. Hello, this is Jack Wilson, the host of the History of Literature podcast. For the past ten years, I've been talking to novelists, biographers, and scholars about the greatest books in the history of the world and the men and women who wrote them. Like our recent episodes on Dante and Love, a starter pack of ten Indian classics, the pop culture that influenced Sylvia Plath and a talk with scientist and novelist Alan Lightman about the wonders of nature. Join us at the History of Literature podcast wherever you get your podcasts.