TCC Podcast #253: Successful Freelancing with Laura Briggs

On the 253rd episode of The Copywriter Club podcast, Laura Briggs breaks down the foundational steps to catapulting your freelance business. Laura is a freelance writer and coach who helps aspiring and current entrepreneurs who are ready to live life on their own terms. Already have a successful business? You’ll hear concepts and ideas through a whole new lens. – Don’t miss this one. Here’s what we talk about: Humans biggest question: “What do I do with my life?” Balancing a full-time job and growing a side hustle business. The best way to use Upwork and break into the freelance writing world. Whether or not you need a website in the beginning. Pitching to clients on weekends through LinkedIn. Your first portfolio and what it needs to include. Landing a 50k ghostwriting book project through Upwork. The pros and cons of Upwork and using it to its fullest potential. Why you need to personalize your pitches. How to overcome the “new writer” syndrome. How retainer projects help you with income projections and how to position yourself to secure the deal. Building your dream work schedule. When you should raise your prices. (and when you shouldn’t.) Creating a writing process that works best for you and your creative genius. Setting boundaries and tuning into the red flags. How to make decisions as a CEO and become an empowered business owner. Sales calls and being okay with the silence. What most freelancers are doing wrong and how to fix it. When you know you’re ready to level up. Delegating to others and creating time and space in your business. Creating a nonprofit around your core values. Offering services that are in demand and match your personality. Check out the transcript below or hit that play button to listen in. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Betterbizacademy.com   Full Transcript: Rob:  Being a successful freelance copywriter is about a lot more than just writing the right words for our clients. There are so many things to think about to do beyond the writing, things like finding clients, or pricing yourself effectively, setting up the right packages, things that our clients actually want to buy, and raising our prices as needed, figuring out retainers, project scope, all of that kind of stuff. Our guest for this episode of the Copywriter Club Podcast is Laura Briggs. Laura is known as The Freelance Coach. And in her business, like we do, she helps freelancers deal with these kinds of challenges. In a moment, we're going to hear how she built her own successful business and then helping others to do the same thing. But first, let me introduce my co-host for today, since Kira is still on maternity leave, Jacob Suckow. Jacob is, I would call him an offer doctor. Jacob, I don't know if you've got a better title for that or not, but he helps his clients really figure out their offers. Jacob:  Awesome. Well, hey Rob, thanks for the introduction, I appreciate it. I don't know if I've ever called myself an offer doctor, but I might have to steal that after today. Excited to be here with you today, excited to hear what Laura has got to say. Rob:  Yeah. I'm looking forward to this conversation also. If you want to find out more about Jacob Suckow, you can find him at top-notchcopy.com, but don't forget the dash. And one of the things, Jacob, I'm going to mention this, even though it's not really live here, you're playing around with this idea of a paid newsletter that you're thinking about doing, talking about all the things about starting a successful solopreneur business. Maybe just give us like a one-liner for what that might turn into when it gets launched. Jacob:  Yeah, sure. So there's a big gap in content out there for people like us who are just building something on their own. And typically, we get a lot of really great feedback on everything except financials, sales, pipeline, and behind the curtain marketing and growth strategies. And so that's what we'll be doing, 100% behind the scenes, full transparency look into QuickBooks, my pipeline, client work, and everything that I'm doing that's either working or not. Rob:  That sounds really cool. I can't wait to check it out when it goes live, we'll keep everybody informed when it launches. So before we get to our interview with Laura, like last week, I'm going to switch things up just a little bit and talk about the Copywriter Accelerator. That's because the Copywriter Accelerator, if we've timed this right, is actually opening up today. The accelerator itself is made up of eight modules, it takes about 16 weeks. We go through it not as a course, but as a program so that you're going through with several other copywriters, figuring out things like business mindset, the kind of business that you want to build packages, processes, pricing, branding, getting yourself in front of the right clients, figuring out your X factor, and a lot more. If that sounds like something you're ready to do in your business, check out the copywriteraccelerator.com. Like I said, it's now open and the cart will be open until, I believe September 1st. We would love to work with you in the accelerator if that's a fit for you and your business. So let's jump into our interview with Laura and her story and find out how she became known as The Freelance Coach. Laura:  I started freelancing in 2012 and was able to leave my full-time job, I used to be a seventh grade teacher. And other people started following that story, and I got profiled in Business Insider, and then that led to strangers asking me about how I did it. And so eventually, I was doing all these one-on-one coffee chats, helping people, especially teachers, telling them how to get started, how to create samples. And then I realized that this would be so much easier if I just consolidated it in one place and had a website and a podcast and free resources that people could use. And so, I've been doing that since 2015. And I've worked with a lot of different freelancers. They've come through my courses or read my books or have been one-on-one coaching clients. And it's been really interesting to see things that I've experienced also be validated by other people and get to see some of the trends that are coming before they really hit the marketplace in a big way. So it's led to a lot of other speaking engagements about future of work as well. Rob:  So when you were a teacher, what was the impetus to make you think, "I'm not doing this anymore, I need to find something else"? And how was it that you settled on freelancing, writing and the stuff that you've ended up doing? Laura:  Well, teaching is an exhausting job. I have a lot of respect for every single person who is a teacher in this country, especially if they have made it to the retirement mark, because I don't know how you did that job for 20 or 30 years and didn't lose your mind. I was working 14 hours a day. Then I would go home and I would grade papers and I would do lesson plans for the next day. I worked in a very high needs district, I taught in downtown Baltimore. We didn't have enough desks or seats for the students, we did not have enough books. I had to use my own personal laptop. It was really, really rough to try to keep up with that pace. I hadn't studied education either, so I went in through a program that was very similar to Teach for America and had a total of six weeks of training to teach seventh grade. It was not enough, as you can imagine. And so I was really getting burned out. Honestly, it was another teacher of mine who inspired me. I had a professor in college, I took his contemporary literature class, and he pulled me aside after class one day with a paper I had written, and he said, "Have you ever thought about changing majors from economics to English?" And I was like, "No, I'm almost done with college, I'm not starting a whole new thing." But that comment stayed in my mind. And so I thought, "Well, maybe I do have some writing ability that if I learned it and I finessed it and got at taking feedback, that this could go somewhere." So I literally Googled how to become a freelance writer and read and absorbed everything I could. Rob:  And what were those first steps that you took as you broke out? Did you just leave teaching cold turkey, "I'm out, I'm doing something new"? Or did you transition out slowly? Laura:  I transitioned to a different job first. I was about to finish up the school year, and an old boss of mine reached out to me and they knew I was teaching because it was the job I'd had before I went into teaching. And she said, "We have another job opening up, we'll wait for you to finish the school year." And it was in marketing, so it was related, I'd be doing some writing. And I thought, "Well, this will be a good transition. I'll do this for a year while I figure out what to do with my life." Because I was in a PhD program at that time, I wanted to be a professor, I really thought I was going to go into traditional education, and teaching middle school just completely killed that for me, I didn't want anything to do with education for awhile. So I took a job, that job doing marketing. I stayed there for 13 months. I started my side hustle at the same time that I started that job, but I wanted to give myself a real year to figure out one, was this even sustainable? I didn't know if there were seasons to freelance writing, I didn't know if this was something I could keep up with every month or if it would just be a side hustle. So my goal was to make it 12 months and really see what the revenue looked like and if I could make that decision to take the leap from there. And that's when I left and went full-time in the summer of 2013. Rob:  Okay. So let's talk about the balance then.