Freelance Transformation

Getting started in freelancing might be a deliberate step or it might happen serendipitously. But how can you make sure that your freelancing business is successful? Eric Covino, founder of Creative Signals, shares his story about building an agency from freelancing.

He started freelancing after he volunteered to make a website for his sensei. Over 8 years, he grew this side interest into an agency, through chance, deliberately seeking out knowledge, learning from mistakes, and actively deciding what he wants his business and his personal life to look like. Eric shares how he got started with freelancing, how freelancing became his full-time job, his decision to build an agency, and how he's done it in a financially sustainable and stable way.

https://freelancetransformation.com/episode110

Alma Abreu, from 360 Agile Pro, is a project management pro and specializes in showing small business owners, start-up founders, and entrepreneurs how to manage a virtual team and how to do project management for service based businesses. She also owns a content marketing business where she applies all of the best project management strategies, allowing her to take a step back from the day to day business management.

Alma shares her story of stumbling onto her perfect niche, trying to do it all herself, getting overwhelmed, and then hiring freelancer writers and editors to complete the content work. Alma went beyond just removing herself from writing content to creating processes to manage her virtual team and training a virtual assistant to do the project management, allowing her to pursue the lifestyle she wants.

https://freelancetransformation.com/episode109

Zvi Band built a successful software consultancy directly from building and maintaining relationships with people. By networking and maintaining relationships, he was able to build software for agencies, startups, venture capital firms, and even fortune 500 companies like Ford.

Zvi Band is also the cofounder of Contactually, an amazing piece of software that makes it easy to track and maintain the relationships in your network. Zvi shares how to connect with people, and how to maintain and manage relationships in a way that leads to clients.

https://freelancetransformation.com/episode108

One of the hardest things about owning an agency, or being a solo operator, is that a lot of us get into it without necessarily being an expert on how to run this type of service business. We tend to have nothing to benchmark ourselves against, because we don't really know how other agencies are doing, and if we're on the right track.

Drew McLellan is the head of the Agency Management Institute, an organization devoted specifically to bringing agency owners together to help them build better agencies. Through research, AMI has figured out the formula to a successful agency: What are the key financial benchmarks? What is the role of the agency owner?

https://freelancetransformation.com/episode107

In FT episode 101, Chris Evans, from Traffic and Funnels, laid out a strategy for using paid traffic to get clients for high-ticket services (a service that is at least $10,000). Chris's business partner, Taylor Welch, shares how to convert the prospects coming from the paid traffic funnels and other sales funnels into paying clients.

Taylor shares the three steps to his sales process, how to attract the right prospects who can benefit from your services, how to prompt prospects into recognizing that they have a problem that you can solve, how to close a sale through honesty and recognizing whether a prospect is a good fit, and how to set expectations so you have happy clients.

https://freelancetransformation.com/episode106

Laura Belgray, of talkingshrimp.com, is a freelance creative copywriter who helps people with all the words they use in their businesses. She started out writing promos for TV networks and won numerous awards for her work. While she continues freelancing for the big networks, she also offer copywriting for small business and has collaborated with Maria Forleo to create a copywriting course called The Copy Cure.

Laura shares the strategies she used to get started as a copywriter, why good copy matters when you are trying to get your audience to know, like, and trust you, how good copy can help your business, and how to write good copy yourself.

https://freelancetransformation.com/episode105

Being a digital nomad isn't about sitting on a beach with your laptop. It's about choosing to live a certain lifestyle as you start and grow your own business. And it can be really hard if you are plagued with toxic mindsets.

Joel Bergeron, co-founder of The Future is Creative and Freelance Business Success Summit, shares how he got started as a digital nomad, the lifestyle of the digital nomad, the critical mistake he made with his first business, and the key mindset shifts about freelancing that he had to make in oder to find success. Joel shares what you have to do as a freelancer to have a business that you enjoy.

http://freelancetransformation.com/episode104

Gini Dietrich, founder of Arment Dietrich and Spin Sucks, quit her job one day and decided to go out on her own to start a PR agency that does PR for its clients the way she knows it should be done. Right away, she had her first client, and a few months later, her first employee. Then, over the next two years, she had her first fortune-500 client, then her first 14 employees, and her first $2 million in revenue. Ten years later, she has a 30-person agency that mostly runs itself so she can focus on doing the things she really likes to do, such as teaching, writing, and figuring out where the industry is going.

There is a lot to learn from Gini's journey, from how she used her connections and sticking to her values to get her first clients, how her content marketing took off, how to hire the best people for her team, and how she had to change herself to become a better leader.

But, as Gini says, it all comes down to going out and just doing it, rather than getting caught up on what people say you should do.

https://freelancetransformation.com/episode103

Past FT guests, such as Philip Morgan, Jane Portman, and Jonathan Stark, have written and self-published books as a very effective way to establish their authority in their field and as a means to attract their ideal clients.

Chandler Bolt is the founder of Self Publishing School and teaches students how to write and self-publish their first book. Chandler shares why a book is a feasible endeavor with a lot of benefits, his process for writing a book, how to get a book published, and critical tips on how to get listed and found on Amazon.

https://freelancetransformation.com/episode102

When you start out as a freelancer, your journey consists of figuring out who your ideal clients are, how to reach them, and building a service around one of their burning problems. Now what? It's time to build a funnel.

Chris Evans is the cofounder of Traffic and Funnels with his business partner, Taylor Welch. Their agency specializes in building out funnels for consultants and service providers. So we're not talking about selling ebooks here, we're talking about using these strategies to sell $10,000+ services.

Chris shares with us the process of building out an effective sales funnel for selling higher priced services and how to use paid traffic to attract your target market to your funnel.

https://freelancetransformation.com/episode101