how

I want to, um, how I want to organize it.

But I think that the first bit of advice or, or, um, the first thing I have to say about this would be once you have your first client or your first few clients, I think it's really important that you, um, Get testimonials from them, you know, get somebody to give you some feedback on what's working and what you need to improve upon and get some social proof, some things that you can put out there to say, hey, I've done this work.

This person was really happy with it.

Because what happens is that as a freelancer, as you are taking on more and more clients, you can then begin to raise your prices, right? And that is one of the things that I think can be kind of like the wild west in the world of freelancing is this idea of pricing and how do I price myself? And, you know, there's no real concrete blueprint.

You know, people are doing things really differently from charging hourly to charging by project to getting themselves onto retainers.

And I think that in the beginning, up-leveling yourself quickly and then raising your prices quickly can really contribute to feeling like you're earning more, more consistently.

How did you overcome that and what results have you seen by pushing through that?

Yeah,

right.

You know, definitely the things you said about communication and boundary setting absolutely apply to me as well.

You know, just learning about who your work is for and what you're willing to do and spend your time on and what you're not is something that takes some time as you get into this.

But the thing I think that really stands out for me is the knowing that the thing that I started out doing, so three years ago when I first walked into this work and wanted to grow my own thing, just the realization that it's not gonna be that exact thing for the rest of my life.

What's become very clear to me is that entrepreneurship is really a journey.

And it really requires a lot of personal growth.

It's fun to do creative, new, interesting things.

How do you balance that with then getting your first few clients and making sure that they don't feel neglected? What recommendations would you have?

Yeah, this is such a good question.

And really, I imagine the one that holds people back and keeps people from making changes they really want to make.

And I would say the first thing I'm going to say is not going to be probably something people want to hear.

But I think the first thing to wrap your brain around is that it is going to feel hard because there's only a certain number of hours in the day.

But I think that if you can ground yourself in the fact that something is going to feel hard before you start, it's going to make it less likely that you quit when you do run into those limitations and those frustrations of not enough time.

So that's kind of the first thing is just, you know, walking into something knowing this is going to feel really hard at times and it's still important enough for me to try.

But how do you would you recommend telling your clients that you're, you know, a full time teacher in addition to helping them? Would you recommend having a VA or an autoresponder on your email or what? How did you handle that early on when you had clients and a full time responsibility?