Live In The Feast

Today’s guest is Avani Miriyala. Avani is a UX designer, podcaster, and entrepreneur. She helps people create systems so that they can break through the status quo. Avani runs a design consultancy business and shares her knowledge with others through her podcast.

In 2017 Avani made the decision to leave her full-time job and pursue her consulting business full-time. And it’s turned out to be one of the most defining choices she ever made.

She likes to say that empathy is her superpower. She loves talking to people, getting ideas from user interviews, and getting to know what other people are thinking. This knowledge directly relates to product ideas and the problems she tries to solve.

Though she admits that social comparison is often the enemy, she has used it in the past to support her pursuits. Just knowing that others were out there doing what she wanted to do was enough to help quell her fears and take the leap.

Through the process of niching down, Avani has focused the emerging market of cryptocurrency and become one of the go-to consultants for companies looking to build their sites or digital wallets.

Currently, Avani is focused on growing her own consultancy business, building UX strategies for cryptocurrency businesses, and guiding others along the freelance journey with her Six-Figure Freelancer Roadmap.

In this episode Avani talks about:

• How mediocrity and the status quo can lead to a less fulfilling life.
• Climbing the corporate ladder and how she realized it wasn’t what she really wanted.
• The fear of the unknown and how she moved through it to pursue her dreams anyway.
• How niching down positions you as a trusted expert and attracts more clients.

Main Takeaways

• Leaving what you know can be like jumping out of a plane and hoping the parachute opens, but at the end of the day, it’s worth it to figure out what you really want.
• The power to create the life you want is always in your own hands, even though you sometimes feel it’s not.
• When you’re in a transitional period or stuck, talk to other people and learn from their experiences.
• You have to bet on yourself. Others won’t take a chance on you if you don’t take one on yourself.

Important Mentions in this Episode

• Avani Miriyala Podcast
• The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks
• Six-Figure Freelancer Roadmap
• Avani on Instagram

Today’s guest is Ryan Carson. He’s a father, entrepreneur, and a developer. He founded Treehouse, an online education platform that aims to makes technology education affordable for all.

After a decade running Treehouse, Ryan seriously considered selling the business. When he tried to let the buyer down easy, the buyer said he intended to “crush” Ryan and his business. This ultimately became a defining moment in his career.

He knew he would do anything to keep his business alive, including outworking and out competing his competition. It revived his fire for the business and pushed him to start learning all the ins and outs of business that he never had time for before.

After teaching himself sales, he found that it wasn’t necessarily complex, just hard. He kept himself motivated by using visualization tactics and learning from the most focused and intense people he could find, such as Jocko Willink.

Ryan has had a lot of wins, but he’s also learned the hard way about burning bridges and the importance of maintaining good relationships.

Today, Ryan spends his time growing Treehouse, and doing his part to bring equality in the workplace by providing technical education to the masses. Improving his physical fitness and being a good father and husband are also huge parts of his life.

In this episode Ryan talks about:

• Saying no and trusting your instincts when it comes to big decisions.
• How a CEO coach has been essential part of his business and personal growth.
• Visualization and how it can help you achieve your goals and, just as important, knowing what to do after you reach them.

Main Takeaways

• Take time to digest big decisions. Put your customers first and trust yourself to make the right call.
• Push yourself to learn new skills, but don’t do it at the cost of your family or personal life. Be focused and clear when you are working.
• Visualize your goals and really see your desired outcome happening.
• Don’t burn bridges. You never know what will happen in the future and how valuable those relationships may be.

Important Mentions in this Episode

• Treehouse
• Jocko Willink’s Podcast
• Eric Thomas on Buster Douglas + Mike Tyson

Today’s guest is Bridget Willard. Bridget is a teacher, marketer, and social media specialist. She’s also the co-founder of the Women Who WP Meetup. Bridget specializes in helping her clients with relationship marketing.

Though Bridget is a teacher by trade, she became a self-taught marketer early on, which lead her down a winding path that eventually brought her to working with WordPress developers.

Bridget’s Chronic Fatigue Syndrome made it challenging to take on most jobs, so when she learned about WordPress and Twitter, she felt it was the perfect fit. Twitter opened her world to being able to create real relationships with people online, people she would have never had access to otherwise.

Recently, Bridget’s husband passed away and it reaffirmed for her that people and relationships are what matter most in this life, so she strives to connect people and strengthen those bonds everyday.

As a freelancer and remote worker, she found it was too easy to simply stay inside by herself all of the time, which lead her to co-founding the Women Who WP Meetup. She also began speaking at WordCamps and is very active in the WordPress community.

You can currently find Bridget at Women Who WP meetups, or speaking at a WordCamp near you. And, of course, you can find her on Twitter.

In this episode Bridget talks about:

• Changing career paths and taking opportunities as they come.
• Creating opportunities by building real relationships with people both in person and online.
• How Twitter is a gold mine for listening to customers and building relationships because they tell you what’s important to them through their tweets.
• Growing a client base by truly listening to what people need.

Main Takeaways

• You can get great opportunities from building relationships with people, but you have to truly care about those people or it doesn’t work.
• Automation is an important tool for marketers, but if you have a set it and forget it mentality, there’s a lot you’re going to miss, especially if you’re trying to build relationships.
• You can’t measure the things that matter most in life, so sometimes it’s not about engagement or ROI, it’s about people.
• Just because you don’t have all of the clients you need or are making the money you need doing the thing you love doesn’t make you a failure. You are only a failure when you quit.

Important Mentions in this Episode

• Women Who WP Meetup
• WordCamp
• Bridget Willard on Twitter

Today’s guest is Val Geisler. Val is a mom, email strategist, writer, and self-described connector. She writes amazing, detailed emails for the world’s biggest brands that turn customers into raving fans.

As a mother of two girls and an entrepreneur, Val spends a lot of time thinking about how to raise her girls in the era of the Internet and how to represent being a working mom.

Val’s degree and background in theater and as a stage manager gave her the tools and skills she needed to work independently and to build her business chops. It also taught her a lot about the value of having a niche skillset.

After getting out of theater, she worked in retail, sales, and as an in-house email marketer. It took having her second daughter to realize what she wanted was to work on her own terms and on her own time and that freelancing was the best way to accomplish that.

Val is currently creating a workshop for people who want to learn more about the technical side of email.

In this episode Val talks about:

• How customer experience is about connecting the dots between your brand and your customers.
• How being a mom made her realize that we don’t need as much as we think we do and how we can apply that mentality to our marketing.
• How being a specialist can help you raise your rates and go deeper with your clients.

Main Takeaways

• Your customers are people, not bank accounts. They have needs and wants and need to be nurtured.
• We live in a highly automated world and everyone wants to feel a personal connection in some capacity and that’s what we need to bring back to the online experience.
• Creating deliverables for your client that they can repurpose and use over and over again adds real value and can open their eyes to more opportunities.
• Let your niche work for you. Becoming a specialist allows you to go all-in on a subject and can help you attract the right clients.

Important Mentions in this Episode

• Val’s Newsletter
• Consulting Pipeline Podcast
• Val on Twitter

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Today’s guest is Matt Inglot. Matt is a husband, web agency owner, and podcast host. He runs Freelance Transformation and helps other freelancers find higher-paying jobs while also showing them how to reduce the amount of time they work.

Though Matt had always dreamed of building and running a successful web agency, it wasn’t an easy or clear path. He initially started freelancing as a web developer and then built up an agency, only to discover he didn’t want a big business with all of its complexities after all - he wanted the freedom of something smaller.

Though it caused him quite a bit of stress, that realization ultimately led to a lot of personal growth because it forced him to really look at his business and figure out what was working and what wasn’t.

After some soul searching, Matt realized he was okay with being a solo business owner and found a way of working that gave him creative satisfaction and the ability to support his family.

As most freelancers know, being able to simply take a vacation and not be ruled by clients and email is a pretty big deal. It was on his first real vacation, in fact, that he prosed to his wife. This kind of self-care is a regular part of how Matt now operates his business.

Based out of Calgary, Alberta, Matt continues to run his web development agency with a focus on strategy and the ability to maintain the freedom for which he has worked so hard.

In this episode Matt talks about:

• How he went from freelancing to pay his rent, to having a full team of developers and an office (and back again).
• When he realized that the work he dreamed of doing wasn’t actually the work he wanted to do.
• How reinventing his business was mostly about figuring out the right clients to work with.

Main Takeaways

• Listen to your intuition when something doesn’t feel right. It’s usually a good indication that you need to course correct.
• It’s never too late to fix what’s not working. You just have to be willing to take a step back and figure out what those things are.
• Figuring out who the right clients are for your services is a big key to having a successful business.
• Building the business you want is different for everyone. It doesn’t need to be big or complex to be successful.

Important Mentions in this Episode

• Freelance Transformation
• Freelance Transformation Podcast

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Today’s guest is Vincent Pugliese. Vincent is a dad, husband, photographer, coach, and author. He runs The Freelance Tribe and helps others on their journey to finding success as a freelancer.

In 2007, just before the economic collapse of 2008, Vincent left his job to start his own photography business. In spite of the timing, he was able to get his family out of debt and create a thriving business - eventually reaching the point where he could be selective about his clients and wasn’t living project to project.

Though he barely finished high school, Vincent clawed his way back by going to college and then getting a job with a newspaper as a photographer. At one particular low point, his father told him something that changed his life forever - that he was settling.

That, along with the realization that no matter how hard he worked he would always be held back by traditional employment, led him to jump ship and start his own business.

Vincent focused on building a network rather that focusing solely on money, which gave him long-term stability. He chose to focus on his strengths, and this too helped him attract the ideal clientele.

Today, Vincent and his wife are running the Business of Photography Academy as well as a mastermind community for freelancers. When he’s not shooting weddings and other events, he can be found spending time with his family and homeschooling his three boys.

In this episode Vincent talks about:

• His journey from getting in trouble with the law to becoming an award-winning photographer to running a thriving freelance business.
• How even after winning awards and reaching a pinnacle in his newspaper photography career, he still found himself struggling to support his family.
• Finding your niche and finding the right clients to be your target audience.
• How he paid off his debt and raised his prices when other businesses were struggling.

Main Takeaways

• Winning awards for your talent does not always equate to making money - especially when done within the constraints of a traditional career path.
• The sooner you can become a giver and think about somebody else first and your business second, the sooner your business is actually going to thrive.
• When you have little to lose you should be seeking out opportunities to improve your situation.
• Freelancing is all about creating and maintaining relationships and connections and helping others.
• Success doesn’t happen overnight. It’s about building a strong business over time.

Important Mentions in this Episode

• Freelance to Freedom
• Business of Photography Academy

Today’s guest is Carrie Dils. Carrie is a freelancer, podcaster, writer, educator, and web developer. She runs a very popular blog where she shares her experiences as a business owner and teaches others how to build their own freelance businesses.

Carrie didn’t start out as a developer. She came to it from a far more traditional business - a local coffee shop.

When Carrie left the corporate world early in her career, she visited a coffee shop that she fell in love with, and decided to recreate the experience in her home town.

After almost a decade working at Starbucks trying to build experience, she realized she wanted nothing to do with owning a coffee shop. Still, she was able to glean a lot of the details of running a business from the experience.

She first realized she was in love with freelancing when a radio station paid her $20/hr to make banner ads. She could work when she wanted, from wherever she wanted, and that was enough to get her hooked.

Despite the loving the freelance life, Carrie often found herself in situations where her clients wanted to hire her. However, it was through taking some of these opportunities that she realized just how much it meant to her to run her own business.

These days, Carrie is building Fearless Freelancer - a program for freelancers who are just starting out. It provides the resources and training to help people create a freelance business they actually enjoy.

In this episode Carrie talks about:

• How being yourself and embracing who you are is the way to provide a great experience for clients.
• Working in a cube farm and feeling the soul sucking drain from days spent working in an environment that wasn’t challenging her.
• Building something for one audience and having another one show up.
• Writing an opinionated book that shows the real world of freelancing.

Main Takeaways

• Be yourself with your business. Don’t try to be someone you’re not.
• Don’t make decisions based on emotional responses, but always check in with how a work situation is making you feel.
• Sometimes the people for whom you create something aren’t the ones who actually show up.
• The real freelance experience is not like what’s advertised - there are no hacks to a successful freelance business.

Important Mentions in this Episode

• Fearless Freelancer
• Fearless Freelancer Facebook Group
• On twitter @cdils

Today’s guest is Paul Jarvis. Paul is an author, designer, online course creator, and podcaster. Paul has been a freelancer since the 90’s and, though he has transitioned completely to products, he still keeps everything extremely simple. His newest project is a SaaS called Pico.

Paul is a big believer in “scratching your own itch” when it comes to products (and even services).

One of his defining moments was when he quit his job as a creative director. His plan was to get another job, but when a number of clients from his previous employer approached him about continuing to work directly with him, his freelance career was born.

This was a pretty big deal because he’d never considered working for himself as an option. I was a scary leap to go from being an employee to running a business. Running a business is about so much more than just “doing the work”. It was a new education in and of itself.

As is the case for a lot of freelancers, self-employment wasn’t without its struggles. A low point for Paul was learning the hard way that clients don’t always do what they say their going to do (e.g. pay you). At one point, a client owed him as much as $30k, most of which he ended up losing permanently.

The lesson, though, is that it’s ok to stop working for crappy clients. Have a contract and a process and if the client isn’t willing to abide by it, then walk away.

The move from client work to products was another unexpected twist in Paul’s career, as it wasn’t something he had necessarily planned on. But as his various courses and apps began to grow, he eventually stepped away from client work completely.

A big part of the appeal of staying small and nimble is the freedom it gives him to work on new things. Whether it’s a new book, SaaS or course, Paul’s projects tend to shift every few months, and it’s what keeps him engaged and excited.

In this episode Paul talks about:

• How he picks his projects
• Keeping things simple
• Starting a business when you don’t know how to run a business
• Leaving freelancing for product creation and book writing
• Productivity and batching

Main Takeaways

• Having a skill-set is great but you have to learn how to run a business skills as well.
• Getting clients who need more than one project can help fill your sales funnel without a lot of additional marketing or sales efforts.
• Tie your payments to deliverables and not timelines.
• Create evergreen content and repurpose it. It can remove a ton of the stress of feeling like you always need to be creating something new.

Important Mentions in this Episode

• Pico
• Chimp Essentials
• Sunday Dispatches

Today’s guest is Philip VanDusen. Philip has more than 20 years of experience in strategic branding, graphic design and product development. He’s the owner of a strategic design and branding consultancy, Verhaal Brand Design (the Dutch word for “story”), and a YouTuber.

Philip started as a fine artist in painting and as a college-level art teacher before moving to NYC where he started designing t-shirts and selling them around the city. After that he essentially fell into the apparel industry and eventually settled into a creative director role.

Email played an significant role in Philip’s career early on when he created his newsletter, Brand Muse. Though, admittedly self-promotional in the beginning, it eventually led to sharing videos on YouTube, which served as content and inbound marketing for his brand and agency.

One of Philip’s defining moments was realizing that not all career paths are linear. Having struggled to make a living as fine artist, he found other ways to support himself (starting an apparel brand, working as a creative director). But he never gave up the painting.

Philip has a lot of projects in the works, including a series on branding for YouTube, a book and training products. You can subscribe to his newsletter to stay on top of everything he’s working on.

In this episode Philip talks about:

• How made the move from fine artist to digital designer + creative director
• Why posting regularly on YouTube is important and how you can add value for your audience
• Why you should start building an email list early
• Why letting go of fears is an important part of finding your ideal career path
• How he loves seeing his work out in the world and how he designed the #1 selling t-shirt of all time
• Flying to Milan on a Leer jet to go shopping

Main Takeaways

• Building an email list early can help you reach your target customers and provides an ongoing way to communicate with your audience and get feedback.
• Understanding the difference between what a client thinks they want and what they really need to reach their goals.
• When you change paths it can sometimes feel like you don’t have permission to go back, but you have to let go of those fears in order to open up the possibilities of what your life and career can be.
• It’s dangerous to define yourself by the tools you use. The tools change so quickly that it’s important to identify with underlying creativity than the tool that enables you to execute on that creative motivation.
• Let go of how you define yourself and be willing to take risks and try new things.

Important Mentions in this Episode

• Philip VanDusen on YouTube
• Philip’s Newsletter
• Youpreneur

Today’s guest is Curtis McHale. Curtis is a husband, father, web developer, and business coach (you can find him at curtismchale.ca and SFNDesign.ca).

Currently, Curtis builds membership websites and is a writer and business coach. He helps clients run the business they want, earn what they want, and spend more time with their families. On the development side, he helps his clients achieve those goals through business automation.

Curtis’ favorite quote is: “If you don’t write it down it didn’t happen.” - Jack Ryan (Tom Clancy). This speaks volumes about how he approaches his life and his business. For Curtis, what you write down is what becomes your priority, so it’s important to write things down if you want to make progress toward your goals.

A defining moment in Curtis’ life was realizing he was doing a lot of work but not getting to see his kids as much, even though he was working from home most of the time.

One of the ways he became more effective was by adding constraints to his work. For example, right now he’s only working on iOS - it makes focusing much easier and removes the temptation to get distracted. He likes knowing what he can and can’t do, which allows him to work smarter and truly prioritize what matters to him.

Curtis found his way to coaching after 10 years doing web development and turning it into a six-figure business. At that time, he would talk to friends who would ask how they could improve their business or their income and they’d do 10-minute calls or emails to help them through their roadblocks, which ultimately led to more coaching and less web development.

No journey is without difficulties and Curtis’ story is no exception. One was trying to balance the need to provide for his family and the desire to spend more time with them. Another was accepting that the work he enjoyed the most didn’t always pay as much as other work he could be doing.

In this episode Curtis talks about:

• How seeing his own father spend so much time at work drove him to want to create a life where he could actually spend time with his children.
• Putting everything into his calendar or a todo list.
• How to market in such a way that attracts the right kind of clients.
• Adding constraints to his work to enable him to work smarter and more efficiently.
• Being straightforward and direct when it comes to coaching his clients.

Main Takeaways

• If you don’t write it down, it won’t happen. You have to align your priorities and goals with what you make time for, and the best way to do that is to write it down.
• You don’t have quality of time unless you have some quantity of time. You can’t just schedule long vacations and consider that quality time without having some type of existing relationship to build upon.
• Plan your week and have your top priorities written down (3-5 of them). Too many people get stuck in productivity porn. Ultimately, tools aren’t the solution because they’re aren’t the problem.
• Don’t just do something because it’s what your client says they want. Your job is help them figure out what they really need, whether they know it or not.
• Make sure your marketing and positioning is focused around your ideal customers. Marketing isn’t about you - it’s about your customers. Use your marketing to attract the kinds of customers you want to serve.

Important Mentions in this Episode

Analog Productivity (book)
Brusfri (noise cancelling app)
DigitalOcean (server)
CurtisMcHale.ca
SFNDesign.ca
CurtisMcHale.github.io

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