The Embarrassing Reality Of Working For Myself | Ep. 93

Is building an online business or YouTube channel worth it? After a decade of self-employment, I’m opening up about the challenges, the freedom, and the real strategies that helped me earn a living on my own terms. From weekly meetings with myself to finding the right mentors, I’m sharing what works... and what I wish I’d known sooner.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You know, this is gonna sound really weird to say out loud, but sometimes I wonder if I'm doing the right thing by encouraging people to start and grow an online business or you know, start and grow a YouTube channel, build your personal brand, build your video brand, as I like to call it. Sometimes I wonder if I'm even doing the right thing. I started thinking about this recently when it occurred to me as I looked at the calendar that today, actually the time of this recording, today is the exact 10-year anniversary of the last day that I was employed by somebody else. It seems fitting to uh kind of celebrate that, but also reflect on the last 10 years and maybe paint a picture of what it actually takes to not just start a business or grow a business or do YouTube stuff, but what it actually takes to earn a living from it. Now, if you only just found me within the last 10 years, you might not know that I started this business and this YouTube channel while I had a full-time job. My kids were super little, my husband had a wacky shift schedule, but I really felt like I wanted to figure out how to be a content creator. Um, I really wanted to be a blogger. It turned into like maybe I should also make YouTube videos. It turns out it was a great idea to trust my instincts on that. About a year and three months or so into that little side hustle, my position was eliminated at my full-time job. They restructured, they relocated, they eliminated my position, and I can't even tell you how many times I asked myself, should I just go get another job? Should I just get a full-time job? Many times in the last 10 years, almost at least once a year, I ask myself, maybe I should just look for a job. It's not because I don't love this, and it's not because it's not working, but it's simply because being self-employed is weird, awkward, lonely, stressful, and bumpy. But in the last 10 years, I've managed to figure out how to actually earn a living from it, how to overcome the bumpiness of it, and um how to really lean in and enjoy the weird, awkward unconventionalness of this whole like online business thing. And I want to share some of my thoughts with you 10 years into being fully full-time self-employed. Let's get into it. This is gonna be one of those, you know, kind of like free-flowing, whatever comes out of my mouth, comes out of my mouth kind of thing. I do have a little sticky notepad here with notes, but um one of the hardest things that I had to adapt to, that that I wish I had adapted to or figured out sooner in the last 10 years, is the lack of self-accountability when you're self-employed is really detrimental. And it can feel like freedom. I can I get to do whatever I want, you know. But when you're there's no boss or manager or supervisor or anybody saying, Here are the things that we need from you this week or today or this quarter, and there's nobody to answer to when you don't do those things, it can be really difficult to grow, to grow the business and to move the business forward. And so I want to share a little bit about what I do now to help be self-accountable and to stay on track and to not just, you know, open my computer every day and go down whatever rabbit hole I feel like. And you know, to be honest, there are there are days that that is what I do. There are weeks where that is what I do. This morning I woke up and before I did any work, I actually watched the final episode of Outlander. It's the series finale. And so I thought, you know what, I'm just gonna watch it here at the beginning of the day in bed while I drink my coffee so that I can safely scroll social media without being worried about spoilers. And so that's like a really good example of hey, if there's no boss or supervisor that's like waiting for me to show up, and I have work to do, don't get me wrong, my to-do list is like, where is Meredith? We need to get work done, but there's no like actual person to be accountable to to say, eh, I'm going to play hooky this morning and watch TV before I actually sit down to do my work. But doing that for an entire week or an entire month, it's not healthy for your business to operate that way. So I have some um parameters, some structure in place to help give me what I think of as like stability in the week and in within every day, so that I can have days where I have where I can play hooky for the morning or go down a rabbit hole or something. Because I have the structure in place that kind of tells me where uh what what's really a priority and what can be put off and what needs to be done now and what has to be done in the next 45 minutes. Because I have the structure there, I know where I can wiggle in a little bit of free time, I guess you could say. There's a fly or something flying around, it keeps going between me and the camera, so I don't know if that's gonna show up. But I'll try not to let it distract me. So here's how I do my self-accountability. Every week I have a meeting with myself. Every Monday morning, the first thing I do is I have a meeting with myself. If you're familiar with Gino Wickman's EOS entrepreneurial operating system, something like that. If you're familiar with that, the visionary integrator role, like that kind of thing, my business is not set up that way. Like, not even close. But I've taken some of the principles from that system and applied it where I can, where it makes sense for a business my size. It's just me plus two people who work remotely on my team who live in other places, live in other countries actually. And so I have a meeting with myself every Monday, and I create basically a weekly agenda. It starts with noting down at least one thing on a personal level that I'm grateful for. So this is just like good news, personal good news. And because this happens on Mondays, usually it's like something I did over the weekend with my family, or just some something like that. I just note it down. It's like just a little, you can think of it as like here's something I'm grateful for. And then I do the same thing, but I pull something from the business, something that's working really well in the business, or a lot of times I'm looking at my clients and students inside Video Brand Academy who have shared like a recent win, or you know, recently I had Matthew on the podcast, and that got published. And so that's like a good news from inside the business, and I'll just note that down. I used to do this with a pen and paper. Now I do it digitally. I've used Apple Notes. Now I have things in Obsidian because it does integrate nicely with AI. So we have our good news, our headlines from inside of the business, and that takes like two seconds to just note it down, kind of take stock of what's you know, what's going on in my world essentially. And then I'm looking at my calendar to see what do I actually have that I have to show up for? Like where are my meetings, appointments for in the business, for out of the business, if I have to take one of my kids to physical therapy or you know, something like that. I'm noting those things down. Having it on the calendar is obviously like a no-brainer. It has to be on the calendar. But if if I don't look at the beginning of the week and just note it down, then I will forget. And then everything comes as a surprise, like, oh yeah, I need to get ready to leave the house to go to this appointment. But if I can write it down, then it sticks in my brain more, and I don't have those like moments where I'm like, oh shoot, I need to, I need to leave the house. And it feels like it just kind of snuck up on me, even though it's been on the calendar for three weeks. And then I always choose three areas in the business to focus on uh to complete. I think of it like what can I actually complete, not work on, but complete this week. And to be honest with you, most weeks I don't complete those three things. Sometimes there's just other stuff that pops up that becomes more of a priority, or I just something I wasn't thinking about on Monday when I made this agenda. And so I try to stick to three things that I can complete this week. There's always, always, always more than three things that need to be completed in the week. But, you know, it is what it is, and in semi-sticking to the EOS system, I have what Geno Wickman would call rocks, which are just in my mind, they're just projects, they're like one-off projects that need to be done or need to be worked on or integrated or something. And I have a list of those for the year that I decided at the beginning of the year, like these are the things that I would like to implement and do and complete and integrate in the business this year. They're prioritized, there's always something that comes up and it gets the priorities get shifted around, but at least I'm starting with this like big picture vision of what the year looks like in terms of like what is the work that we're doing on like a project level. Now, I'm not a big proponent of time blocking, not for myself. I don't like time blocking because as soon as my day has boundaries on every hour, that I look at that as like, oh, look at all these rules I'm about to break. I I see it as like a boundary that's a little too tight. And since I'm the one that made the boundary, I'm the one that's gonna break it. So that's why I like to look at it from the week and look at where I have meetings that I have to show up for and kind of play it by ear throughout the week so that I can focus on the things that I said that I needed to focus on and complete without feeling totally constricted with every single like minute of my time. And I also track some metrics every Monday, like how many new leads, sales, how many videos did I publish, um, and things like that that are just for tracking, you know, what you might consider to be KPIs, key performance indicators. Um, and that happens on Mondays too, and it's just real quick, and I can look at stats or whatever, whatever I want to there. Um, but generally I'm just kind of recording the metric and then moving on with the rest of the agenda. Now, the reason why I think this weekly agenda style works for me is because it gives me, it's like the middle ground between big picture, what is the business doing from a big picture perspective, and then I'm able to zoom in on the small stuff. Okay, so like what is the actual task I should be working on right now? Should it be editing a video, recording a video, planning a video, putting together something for Video Brand Academy, or tweaking a sales page, or like what is the actual action that I should be working on? That's like super zoomed in, super granular. Um, for that, sometimes I get out my trusty cube timer um to help me just kind of like narrow my focus in and complete this task. So the weekly agenda is like the middle ground between big picture, little picture, zooming out and zooming in. Now here's the key that weekly agenda stays in front of me all day, every day. And that was actually really helpful when, um, or it was really easy to do when I was using an actual paper and pen like notebook um and doing it like bullet journal style. It it's a little harder when it's all digital, but I got a small additional portable monitor that is vertical, that's right below where my camera is. I have my camera on my teleprompter now. There's nothing on it, I'm not like reading notes or anything, but right below that is a vertical monitor. So now that's my like that's my accountability monitor. That's where I can take a look at what my weekly agenda is. So it's always right in front of me what I'm supposed to be working on. You know, I guess you could think of it like on Mondays, I'm setting that intention of here's what I want to accomplish this week, but then every day the accountability of having it right in front of me um makes it almost impossible to ignore. Almost. Now, because I've been putting my weekly agenda in obsidian, and my obsidian can be connected to Claude Code. I have Claude Code open, um, and I use Claude Code in a folder. I I call it my HQ folder, so headquarters, and I have lots of different Claude skills in there and things that help me um throughout the day, or what really helps me to get on track, to stay on track, is to go to Claude and just say, What am I supposed to be working on right now? It's literally that easy. It's connected to ClickUp, it's connected to my obsidian, it's connected to my email, and um I'm trying to think if it's connected to anything else. And so it'll look at everything and tell me, here's what you're supposed to be working on, here's what you said you needed to do, here's what's in your clickup that's like overdue, and I can either clean things up, reprioritize, set new due dates. But if I then tell Claude, okay, this is what I'm gonna work on right now, it creates this like thought in my head, this connection in my head of like, I'm gonna finish this, then I'm gonna go back and tell Claude that I got it done, and that's gonna feel really good to me. So, I mean, I'm not saying I'm accountable to the AI because the AI is just something that I created, but it helps me be accountable to myself, and that's the important thing here is that it's I'm being accountable to myself. I definitely have some out-of-sight, out-of-mind, um, you know, perhaps executive function challenges. And so that's why having the agenda in front of me helps. Having my AI, having access to it also helps. The other thing that really helps me, and I've only just recently started to lean into this pretty heavily, is I like to have some kind of a visual map or list or diagram or something of kind of the business, like everything in the business, everything we're doing, how it all fits together. And I've done this at different times, like mind map. Um, I've had sticky notes on my wall. Sometimes I just need to zoom way, way, way, way out and just see the whole big picture to understand what I'm doing, what the business is doing, and and so it it makes it make sense when I am down to the nitty-gritty, like granular task that requires my timer cube to like get something done. It helps me feel good about doing that work when I know that it's like a little brick in the wall of the business as a whole. And so, right now, what I have been doing is in ClickUp, which is what I use for project management, I have a handful of um like operations lists in ClickUp in different areas of the business. So there's growth, which is content, launches, promotions, offers, um, lead magnets. There's fulfillment, which is fulfilling on the offers, you know, anything happening in Video Brand Academy or anything like that, that's going on an operations list. And then I have an admin list, which is for me, like pay your team members, do your taxes, like it's that kind of like admin like type of stuff. And I have a dashboard and clickup where I can see those lists all on one page. It's not that helpful to like do project management that way, but I have to see it all on one page in order for my brain to go, oh yeah, this is what this is what we're doing. This is the business, this is what we're working on, these are the priorities. If I don't see it, if I don't have a way of seeing it, I just feel like I'm floating in this space of a business that I created, and I feel sort of directionless. Something that's kind of going through my mind right now where I'm at in my business is like, okay, I got it to here. Now what? Now what do I do with it? I have like uh a hundred different ducks, none of them feel like they're in a row, so I tend to just like add another duck. Let's do this and let's do that. And I can have the best intention in the world, but I'm kind of at a point where I feel like I have to start thinking about the business in terms of what does the business need to have happen? Not what does Meredith want to do today or this week or this month or this year. What do I feel like doing? And that's a really different perspective than I'm used to, like the separation of self from business. I'm in like unknown territory for me, but I'm I'm still kind of like wrapping my head around how that works and how that looks. I think it's always it's for me and for for what I've seen and experienced with other business owners, it's it just becomes this evolution. You change, your business changes, and you figure out the balance of like what needs to happen to keep going and keep growing and keep building the momentum, right? And one of the things that for sure I know have have contributed to my own like personal growth and business growth is having other business owners who are in the same kind of business model as you or in a similar place in business as you, to bounce ideas off of each other, coach each other, um support each other, and just kind of show up and have people to have that sort of like camaraderie with, making it feel less lonely, making it feel less weird and awkward and bumpy because like they're doing the weird, awkward, like bumpy entrepreneurial thing too. And I'm also you know connected to a larger community through my business mentor, James Wedmore. And I mention this because there's so many people teaching so many different things, different business models, different ways of like generating traffic or growing an audience or like doing all doing all the things. And I think, I mean, if you if you've been in business for even a couple years, you've probably like purchased a program or something, and then realized this is not like not actually what I need at all, or maybe it's not even a good program, like maybe it's legitimately not great. Um, you know, you look Live and you learn, right? The mistake that I see a lot of is this like Frankenstein effect of like I'm gonna put this what what this person teaches about um webinars into my business, and I'm gonna put what this person teaches about YouTube, and I'm gonna put what this person teaches about lead magnets or something. And uh those like strategies don't always necessarily line up. And one of the things that I appreciate about James Business by Design Community is like the system and processes and things that he teaches are it's pretty, it's pretty comprehensive for like the foundations of building an online business and generating revenue and like building it in a way that you want, in a way that you're excited to show up for. I've got the the audience growth, the YouTube side like locked in. That's not part of business by design. It the the business side of the business is the business by design stuff. But because I haven't had to bounce around from a mentor for this and a mentor for that and a coach for this and a coach for that, it's all it, you know, most things kind of fit under the BBD umbrella to give me, you know, back when I didn't know anything about what I was doing, it gave me a direction, a path to follow, a clear path to follow and then grow with over time. I'm sure my business would be successful had I not ever joined BBD, but I don't know if I would be enjoying it because business by design is like build your business by design, right? And so there's been there's definitely been times where I wish that my business grew faster. However, I'm really happy with what I've done and where the business is at 10 years in. And it's because I have been intentional about self-accountability, having a close-knit community of people who support each other and guide each other and coach each other and hold each other accountable in sometimes when we need it, and having like actual mentor direction from somebody who's been there done that. So having those kind of stable pillars, those like stable structures in my business day to day has made it so that I do feel like I have a sense of freedom in my business while also having a sense of stability to grow the business. Now I think a natural sort of cliche question is would I do it again? I mean, there's there's probably hundreds of things that I would have done differently if I knew then what I knew now. But that's part of the journey, right? You you figure it out as you go, you live and you learn and you adapt, change, improve, tweak. That's just how it works. But would I do it all over again? Yes, absolutely. I would do it all over again, even if for no other reason, other than I would always wonder if I could. I would always wonder if I could, if I would have been able to start a business from nothing and grow it to the point where I earn a living from it. And I've like obviously the answer is yes, I I did that. I could check that off my bucket list. I did that, right? The next level beyond from just earning a living is where I'm kind of in that transition of like, what does that look like? Now what do I do? Who who am I? What is this? But would I do it again? Yes, absolutely I would. But you probably already knew that that would be my answer. So cheers to 10 years being fully self employed and fully basically unemployable at this point.