Ep. 88 - Leaving Academia #6: Starting a Successful Online Business

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Transcript

EP 88 - Leaving Academia #6: Starting Your OwnOnline Business with Dr. Paulina Cossette 

Leslie: 

Today, I'm excited to be speaking with Paulina Cossette, Ph.D., academic editor and business coach! 

After spending a decade in academia as a tenure-track political science professor and struggling to find joy and work-life balance while working seven days a week, Paulina finally found the courage to leave the academy in 2019. Since becoming a copy editor, she has built a thriving six-figure business that allows her to work wherever and whenever she wants, take real vacations without any guilt, and collaborate with kind, brilliant clients all over the world. Paulina now helps other academics build successful editing and coaching businesses so you can replace your current salary, be your own boss, and finally have the life you've always wanted. 

Sounds amazing! So I wanted to chat with Paulina about the advantages and challenges of starting your own business, especially an editing business. I know many folks in the social sciences and humanities that dream of being self-employed while also being able to engage with research, writing, and important ideas. And they have no clue how to make this pivot. 

This episode is the sixth in my series on leaving academia. I highly encourage you to tune in to the other ones if you haven't already. My solo episodes are Episode 45: Assess Your Situation, Episode 50: Question Your Beliefs, and Episode 51: What Keeps People Stuck. 

And my interviews are Episode 66: Grieving the Loss of Professional Identity (with Dr. Chinaasa Elue) and Episode 78: Using Social Media to Build a Compelling Personal Brand (with Dr. Ashley Ruba). So welcome, Paulina! 

Paulina: 

Thank you so much for having me. 

Leslie: 

So I always like to ask people what your background experience in academia was.

Paulina: 

Yeah, so I got my PhD in 2013, and it was in US politics. I studied Congress, and specifically, bipartisanship in Congress, which I’m glad I didn't continue with! And I did everything that I was supposed to do. I landed a tenure-track job, I published journal articles, I co-authored a book. And at the first school I was teaching at, I was teaching a 5-5 load.
 
 Leslie: 

Oh my God!
 
Paulina: 

So it was quite a lot. And I was just very unhappy. So I changed schools to see if it would get better. Both of the places I worked were small liberal arts colleges or small universities. And the teaching load was better. I think it was a 3-2 at the second place. But a lot of the same problems were still there. And so I ended up leaving in 2019. In the summer of 2019 is when I resigned. 

Leslie: 

So tell me a little bit about your business and when you started putting it together. 

Paulina Cossette: 

So I left that summer of 2019, and we moved across the country to Maine, where my husband grew up. And I had no idea what I was going to do. I thought that I would go out on the non-academic market. And I applied to a lot of different jobs. A lot of them were local here--we live near Bar Harbor in Maine. So there aren't a lot of options, but there are some. 

And I applied to a lot of remote jobs and I got a couple of offers, but they just weren't the right fit. Eventually, I think sometime like late fall, I had finished publishing my book with Routledge, and I had worked with their freelance copy editor who goes through and edits the final manuscript before it goes to print. And my co-author actually sent me an email because he knew I was having trouble finding a new position. And he said, “Why don't you try copy editing?” 

And I thought, “Oh, okay, well, I mean that's enough to keep me entertained and help start bringing in some money until I figure out what else I'll do.” And so that's how I started is I didn't think of myself as a business owner. That felt like too much of a leap. I never dreamed I could be an entrepreneur. So I thought of myself as a freelancer. “I'm just contracted with these other academic presses or with editing agencies or whatever.” And so that's how it all started. 

But after I think it was about three, maybe year four, I realized that if I was going to make any real money, I needed to have my own private clients. And so that's when I got up the courage to start reaching out to individual faculty and grad students. That's when I would say the real business started was because I wasn't just contracting for other people anymore, I was actually bringing in my own clients. 

Leslie: 

Right, right. And it's since evolved to helping others build their own businesses. Can you talk about that? 

Paulina Cossette: 

Yeah. So, once I started connecting with private clients, I had a lot of success in blogging and just started to build traffic to my website. In 2024, I hit six figures through editing and a little bit of coaching and I realized that I was really good at that, and I was good at marketing and I was good at editing. At the same time, though, I really missed teaching. And so that's when I got the idea was like spring of 2024, as the editing business was growing really quickly, I thought, “I really miss teaching and there are a lot of other academics out there who want to leave just like I did and who feel stuck just like I did.” 

Because I see in the last few years, I think there's been a lot of growth, especially on LinkedIn in the post-ac(ademic) field, where we see a lot of coaches cropping up that are helping people leave. But when I was leaving, there was no information out there. I don't think there were any groups or anything that I could find to get help with that. And so I thought, “I bet there's a lot of faculty who would be really great at editing, and I can help them figure out how to do this so they don't have to spend four or five years figuring it out like I did.” 

And so I developed the course Becoming an Academic Editor, and it launched in July of 2024. And basically, it's an online course and a 12-week group coaching program. So it's very similar to the setup of a college course. It's kind of like a mini-semester where about 15 or so of us are all in a weekly Zoom meeting, and we're walking through the process of how do you start freelancing, how do you start contracting with other presses, how do you create your website, how do you start writing marketing copy? And I call it really the business starter kit. 

And so I give you all the templates, all the information you need and the community support to start your business, whether you want to go into editing or some kind of academic coaching, writing coaching, publishing, those kinds of things. And that's grown. We now have over 65 people who've enrolled in the last year and have started their businesses. So that's what my main focus is on now. I'm not taking on any new editing clients at this point because the course is my main passion, really. That's what I really love to do. But yeah, it's been an interesting few years! 

Leslie: 

Yeah. Ah, I didn't realize that the group coaching was so new. So I want to get into the details of that in a minute. But I'm curious also, so you left in 2019, which I think is actually relatively early, right? Pre-pandemic, before things got a little bit hairier in terms of higher-ed. And you left without something else lined up. 

So how did you get thecourage to leave? Was there like a tipping point? I'm always curious about people's stories, like when was the point where you just knew, this is over for me, I have to move on?

Paulina: 

I wish that I could say that it was a very clear decision for me, but itwas honestly torturous. I am an overanalyzer. I was terrified that I was going to regret leaving. I had all those people's, like, my mentors' voices in my head of like, “Oh, once you leave, you can never come back”, and those kind of echoes or those ghosts of fear. That, I think, is quite common from what I've heard from otherpeople.Everybody hears those voices and worries. We're scared. I think we plan our lives as if we're going to spend the rest of our lives in this career. And, we don't even consider any other options.

And so I, like so many other people, just had no clue what else there was out there for me, what else I would be capable of. And certainly, owning a business was the very last item on the list of possibilities. But I would say that I was almost unhappy from the very beginning when I got my first tenure-track job in 2013, because I was living in a place that I didn't want to live. I hemmed and hawed over accepting that job because I knew I was going to hate living there. 

And all my mentors said, “just takethe job. It's a tenure-track job. Who cares if the school is terrible? Who cares if you're teaching four classes a semester?” I ended up doing a 5-5 load to make extra money! “Who cares if you hate living there? This is what you're supposed to do. And you can always change schools later.” As if there are a million jobs out there or something. 

So I think probably I was unhappy from the very beginning, but I just kept telling myself, “if I stick it out, if I get to tenure, if I 'whatever,' it'll get easier. If I change schools, it'll get easier.” But for me, I think the real breaking point is that I had my son in 2018, and I had a semester of maternity leave that fall. And then I came back and taught in the spring, and I just politically, like, teaching US politics in 2018, 2019 was not fun! 

There was a lot of talk at the college where I was about moving to online classes. And of course, pre-pandemic, now nobody thinks anything about online classes, but back then it was like, it was a sign of the MOOC model, right? The massive open online courses or whatever. And that's not what I wanted. I wanted to be in the classroom with students. I didn't want to teach at a liberal arts college that then was going to move all the courses online. And so I just, I think I saw the writing on the wall of where higher ed was going. And there were still budget crises back then as well. 

AndI had my son, and I was working seven days a week. I was awake until 2:00 in the morning every night because I had a new prep that spring that I came back. It was USPresidency, of all courses. And I just realized, “I can't do this anymore. I'm exhausted, I don't have time for my child.” I thought it was going kill me trying to do this for the rest of my life. And so that summer, I said to my husband, “we have to leave.” We wanted to move to Maine. My mother-in-law had lung cancer. I just saw the rest of my life was passing me by as I was desperately clinging to this goal that I thought I should have, when really it was just making me miserable. 

Leslie: 

Thank you so much for sharing that. I always learn a lot from people's stories because again, I think the academy asks us to not have lives and not have real problems that impinge on the work. The work needs to come first, or the mission or whatever it is. And we're seeing a big exodus now for a lot of different reasons. Some people are choosing to leave. Some people have to leave. And you are helping them leave, which is amazing. 

And so I know that a lot of academics are really worried that their skills are not transferable to other kinds of work. They've been trained and over time have become extremely, probably focused on a very small subfield of a subfield. And so I think as people narrow down, they start to get tunnel vision. And then when it comes to pivoting and doing something different from what they've been researching and teaching about, it's really scary. 

So what would you sayare some of the skills you learned as an academic, as a professor, that help you when it comes to doing something like running a business? 

Paulina: 

Yeah, I love this question because I think all of the skills that help us succeed in graduating with a PhD, surviving grad school, getting a job, going through academia, all of those skills are exactly what help you succeed in business!

And letme break that down a bit. So when I thought of what owning a business looked like, I thought of people who owned restaurants or hair salons or brick-and-mortar-type places that require all these massive startup costs and insurance and legal papers, likeall this whole thing. And that is not at all what owning an online business is like. And I think for editing, for coaching, for any kind of academic-centered or academy-adjacent online business, it is much more like teaching your own online course. You're developing some kind of curriculum or some kind of framework that you're teaching or sharing with your clients. 

And you don't have massive startup costs. You need, maybe you want, to create an LLC. That's a couple of hundred bucks. Usually, it depends on the state, but you don't have to. You need a computer and Microsoft Word, maybe a Zoom license or something like that if you're doing coaching. But that's really it. And so the rest of it is just figuring out who do you want to serve and what problems do you want to help them solve, whether it's editing or coaching or anything else. And that's exactly what we've always done as faculty, right? 

Whether you're a grad student trying to figure out what you're going to write about for your thesis or your dissertation, whether you're anew professor who's trying to develop new courses, whether you're a senior faculty and you're writing your next book, you have this problem in front of you. And you have to do the research, sometimes very intensive research, to figure out how to solve that problem. And to me, that's exactly what owning a business is, is you have this idea of what services you want to offer to the world to help people. 

And you have to figure out how you're going to get the word out there, how are you going to market yourself, how are you going to share this information, how are you going to bring in clients. And finding those answers is, if you go the way that I did, the time-consuming route involves a lot of googling and reading business books and finding the answers the same way you would if you had a research question that you were trying to solve. It's just doing research and then implementing it. 

Although we have the easier option, of course, of where you can work with a business coach or you can join a group program or something like that, where you get support and people help you, which we don't have so much of in academia. But I think that those research skills, that persistence, that dogged persistence, probably just the determination to get to the answer and to be successful that gets us so far in academia is what it also takes to be successful in business. 

Leslie: 

Yeah, I love that, I love that. And it's very true. You can do it yourself and you can also hire people to help you. And like in my case, I did both. I started training as a life coach in 2018 with zero idea of how I was going to employ this. “Maybe this is just going to be part of how I teach” all the way to like,” okay, I'm really unhappy where I am.” And the pandemic hit all those things and then I hired a business coach and that's really when things started moving for me. But her process was very much about doing research. 

In this case, it's market research and talking to people about what really are they struggling with and where can I come in? And, how do I talk to them in such a way that it really hits the nail on the head and that there's a kind of connection there that's not just purely transactional? That I'm seeing them and I'm seeing their issues and I've been there as well. 

So, I think that a lot of withbusiness, what stops people is getting themselves out there, actually spreading the word. And this means marketing. So how have you come to feel comfortable? I'm assuming that you do. I don't know if you do, but how do you market yourself, and how do youdeal with visibility and all the things that come with putting yourself out on social media? 

Paulina: 

I think the key is that you just have to stop caring what other people think about you. I know that's easier said than done, but I think for me, when I left academia, something inside me just snapped. And I realized that I had spent decades of my life worried about, “are they going to like this presentation? Are they going to like this paper? Are they going to accept this for publication?” All of those, like, we get voluntold to do stuff and we're too terrified to say no because we don't want people to think we're a troublemaker or we're stirring the pot or whatever. 

And I realized when I left, the women in my department who I thought were my friends never talked to meagain, even though they knew that my mother-in-law was dying of cancer. And I was miserable and so unhappy, and my husband was unhappy. Like, they never talked to me again. And that made me realize that, of course this doesn't apply to everybody, I do have friends who are academics who I still keep in touch with. But in large part, when you're in academia, you're just a number. You're there to serve the institution and to serve the customers, the students. And nobody really from an administrative level, they don't care about you. 

And that, I think for me, was the sign that I had to stop worrying about what everybody else thought and live my life in a way that makes me happy. And that makes my family happy. Because when I'm laying on my deathbed, I don't want to be thinking about “was my department chair pleased with whether I showed up at that meeting or not”. Like, who cares? Who cares about them? I want to know that my kids have great memories of me spending the summer with them. Not sitting at the computer trying to write or whatever. 

That is what I thinkhas allowed me to put myself out there in business, to let my personality and all its weirdness shine through. And I have to say that in academia, if you are your true self, you worry that people are going to judge you or not like you. And the real world is not like that. There are so many billions of people out there. There are people who are going to like you. There are going to be people who don't like you. Who cares? They'll go find somebody else they like. 

I'm sure I'm not everybody's brand of editor or coach, but there are plenty of people who see my posts and think, “wow, that really clicks with me. She totally understands me.” And that's the beauty of owning a business. I think in marketing, is that when you are authentic and you put your true self out there, the people that like you are the ones that find you, and then you work really well together because they already know who you are. You've put yourself out there in a completely honest way and you have a great coaching or editing relationship because they've chosen you.

Leslie: 

Oh, 1,000%! Yeah. And I feel like the clients I have who found me through my podcast, they're already signed up before we ever talk. And I think that's really, really an important thing because again, you don't have to be everybody's cup of tea. There are thousands and thousands, and maybe hundreds of thousands, of people who could help you with your problem. It's about finding the right fit. 

And so I think for me as a business owner, it was a long journey because I was still in the academy for the first few years of building my business, which I think was mostly helpful. But also, I was in my head a lot when it came to posting things that felt really authentic to me. And I had to keep practicing certain thoughts. Certain thoughts around, like, “I'd rather be rejected for who I really am than accepted for who I am not.” I'd repeat to myself as mantras because it was scary to me to be like, “I don't agree with what's going on, I have critical thoughts and I'm actually going to say them.” Or, “life could be better over here if you…” 

So I think there's a whole journey thatpeople go on when it comes to marketing. And I imagine that some of your clients are still in the fear-based territory when it comes to marketing. So how do you help them find that voice? 

Paulina: 

I think that that is actually the biggest challenge of all when it comes to academics. Starting a business is, there are so many people, I give them all the tools. I say, here's the exact framework, the exact steps you need to take to be successful. And I know it works because it worked for me and it's worked for dozens of other people who've done it in my program. But taking those first steps, for example, having them make a post on LinkedIn, just introducing themselves, just saying “I'm an editor.” 

Even if you're keeping your faculty job, which many people do, either they want to stay in academia or they want to stay for a couple more years until they can retire or whatever. Even just putting it out there and connecting with that new identity of saying, I'm working as an academic editor now, that's terrifying for a lot of people.

So what I've started doing is, I make them do it during our cohort, during our 12 weeks together. Because what I've learned is that if they don't do it when I'm there gently pushing them towards it, they kind of talk themselves out of it. I'm working with people who are some of the most accomplished and most talented and intelligent people ever, and yet they feel like they aren't good enough. They're full of self-doubt and they lack confidence. 

And when they jump out of thatcomfort zone and they take that leap and try, they succeed. And they get a very warmwelcome from people. They post on LinkedIn saying, “I'm an academic editor, can you send me clients?” Or whatever. And people celebrate them! They're thrilled to see that these people are pursuing this new path and that it's making them happy. But there's something about that first step that is terrifying. And so I think if we can do it together while I'm sitting there holding your hand, it's so much easier for them to actually do it. And then once you've done it, you realize it's not as scary as you thought it was going to be. 

Leslie: 

Yeah, it's like rinse and repeat. I remember when I was, I think, only one or two months into my life coach training program, which was a nine-month program, they were like, “now you need to go get paying clients.” And I was like, “what are you talking about? I've only just started this thing. I don't know anything about coaching!” How could I charge money I should be paying other people so that I could coach them for practice? And that was their model. It was like, you know what? If you want to do this, you got to do it. So I started with like, “okay, I'm going to charge someone $20 a session.” Then it became like $30, and then it goes up from there. But each step was hard. 

So how do you also help people with the chargingpart of it? Cause I know that can be very difficult for academics who are used to giving their labor away, especially when it comes to things like editing. 

Paulina: 

I mean, obviously, people are free to charge whatever they want, but I have a very firm recommendation, and that is if you are doing coaching, you are to charge at least $100 an hour to start. And my thinking on that is that in this business, we call it coaching, but it's no different than what you've been doing for years. Supervising graduate students or giving feedback to an undergrad on their thesis or whatever. We've had hours, I mean, how many thousands of hours have we spent sitting in our offices during office hours doing this kind of work with students or with colleagues, huh? 

And it's the same thing whether you're giving feedback to somebodyon their journal article and they're paying you to do that in a coaching role for $100 an hour or more, or whether you're giving feedback to a colleague in your office and you're not getting paid. It's the same kind of work, right? So I think that people do have tons of experience. And then when it comes to editing, I tell people to charge for private clients to charge at least 4 to 5 cents a word to start out, especially if you're working with faculty, because that's the going rate. Right? 

And again, you have plenty of experience editing documents and correcting writing. You've just never called it copy editing or developmental editing. It was just “co-authoring” or whatever. And so, I think that's the advantage of going into editing or coaching is that you, as faculty and even as grad students, you've really done all of these things. It was just in a university office instead of at home on Zoom. 

Leslie: 

Right, right.

Paulina: 

Or it's like you said, you're doing it for free, basically, instead of getting paid what you deserve for it. 

Leslie: 

Right. But I also think there is a mental hurdle that comes with, “okay, thatwork should be paid.” So I reached a kind of tipping point, I think, in my own business where I was kind of like, “I need to be paid for my time. It's no longer about what will I do for free and what will I charge.” Other than that, what do you think are the biggest challenges that new business owners face when they're coming from academia? 

Paulina: 

Well, let me follow up on that point that you made about believing that I deserve to be paid for this. And I should add that I think it's important to think about what value you're bringing to your clients, because we are taught in academia to serve endlessly. And to give and to give and to give. And that it's like this, not charitable, but that it's an honorable. Or to teach is like the most honorable job in the world. Or whatever. And it is. But we're not charities, right? 

We spent hours and yearsgathering all of this knowledge that we're then sharing with people. And so I encourage people to think in terms of the value that you're sharing with your clients as opposed to the time. So, for example, if somebody's going out on the job market and you are editing their cover letters and their research and teaching statements, if your edits are what lands them the interview, how much money is that worth to them? If this is their dream job, how much money is that worth to them? Is it worth $500 or $1,000? I mean, I know a lot of people that would pay $1,000 if it meant that they were going to get an interview when they otherwise wouldn't have. So I think thinking in terms of the value of what people are taking away from working with you is a great way to turn that pricing question on its head.

Leslie: 

Yeah, I think that's great. 

Paulina: 

But, your question about other challenges that people have leaving academia, I think really marketing is the biggest thing. Just like we hear “business” and we think, “oh, that's too much work. There are too many know, I have to get a lawyer, I have to get an accountant, and I have to do all these things. It's too hard.” We have this idea in our head about marketing and that that means paying for ads or dancing on Instagram or doing weird stuff. Or trying to persuade people in a sleazy, used car salesman kind of way to hire us. And that's absolutely not true. That's just this image that we have in our minds. 

And marketing, all it is is telling people about what you do and howyou can help them. And you don't push anybody. I don't twist anybody's arm to get them to enroll in my program. I tell them very clearly, “here's what I do, here's what I've done for other people and what they've accomplished. And if you feel like it's a right fit for you, then I'd love to have you join us.” It's the same thing with editing. You put yourself out there and you say, “this is what I can do for you.” And then the people, by sensing your personality and your style and all of that, the people who like that and who feel like they can get a lot out of working with you, they'll hire you. 

Leslie: 

Yeah. I mean I don't think it's like rocket science or whatever, but I do think it takes a lot of practice and a lot of shifting of maybe the approach that you've had as an academic. And a lot of it is consistency, right? People have to see you, and they have to see you multiple times. They have to then learn about what you're doing in a really clear way. The other thing that I've done a lot on LinkedIn is just post stories -- for a long time it was about leaving academia. At this point, now that I'm three years out, it's less about that because it's no longer top of mind. But it could be about being a parent or just some different reflections that I've had on vacation. 

And I just put that out there because I'm like, “you know what, I have something to say.” I don't know if anyone will read this, and it doesn't really matter. But it also gives folks insight into me as a three-dimensional person and not just a business owner. Because I see so much of that kind of approach on LinkedIn, of just, “this is what I can do. A, B and C, come get on a call with me, check out my whatever.” And I'm like, “this is very rote,” and if I'm going to hire someone, I want to know who you are a little bit about you as a person. So it sounds like you're kind of on that vibe as well. 

Paulina: 

Yeah. And I think it comes back to that earlier question we talkedabout. How do you get the courage to put yourself out there and be authentic? And that's what people are looking for. They don't want to hire some random coach who writes everything in ChatGPT and everybody says the same thing. They want to hire an editor or a coach that they connect with, that they laugh with, that they know is going to be their mentor and their supporter and the person that's on their team. 

And so yeah, I think that the best way to be authentic is to tell stories about your life and say, “this is how I got here,” “this is something I struggled with,” or “the other day I was working on a paper and I wasn't sure how to correct this sentence.” And so blah, blah, blah, whatever happened. People love, I think we all love to see inside other people's lives. And in your telling of those stories, which technically is your marketing, right? In your telling of those stories, people get a sense, like you said, of who you are and what you're about and what's important to you and that's how they connect with you. And that emotional connection, I think is what makes people want to hire you or to buy from you. 

Leslie: 

Totally. I think when I made the switch to thinking about marketing as connection, I feel like that's when everything clicked. And so I think that's super important advice. 

Can you give me a sense just very quickly of how you structure your group program? What's the order of operations when it comes to building a business in 12 weeks? 

Paulina: 

Sure. So when people enroll in “Becoming an Academic Editor,” and I need to change the name because it's also academic coaching, not just editing, but they get immediate access to the online course. So we have six modules of videos and templates and checklists and all these dozens of resources at this point, plus bonus workshops with experts about marketing and other things. They get immediate access to that material and they can start going through the videos and the tools whenever they want. Then we have this 12-week group coaching cohort structure. 

And so forexample, I'm running a cohort now that started in May, the next one starts in September, and we meet once a week, and we really go through the chronology of building a business. So we start in the first week with talking about what is it like to change your identity from academic to business owner as an editor or coach. And the course meetings track the videos, but we are able to spend as much or as little time as that particular cohort needs on each segment. So if everybody's already left academia in a particular cohort, we just talk about it for a week and then we go on. But other times they need more space for that. 

Then we go into figuring out who is your ideal client, how do you want to serve them, how do we learn to talk to our clients in marketing. We don't want to lead with our credentials, we want to lead with how we solve people's problems and what is it that they need. And then we go into more of the mechanics of it, of how do we post on LinkedIn and how do we create the website and kind of the tech side of things. 

And then we close out the last few weeks with what has been working, what do they enjoy doing? Because not everybody wants to be on LinkedIn. Maybe some other people like Instagram better, right? You find that tool that works for you, that you can be consistent with and we make a plan for the next 6 months so that everybody leaves those 12 weeks knowing, here's what I need to do to be successful. So that's kind of the, there's a lot of details in there, but that's kind of the overarching idea. 

Leslie: 

That's great. I think it's definitely filling a gap. I hate that term, but it's definitely meeting a need. I do so much one-on-one coaching, but I know a lot of folks really prefer a group. And having that kind of communal support. Having structure and accountability, that's not just one-on-one, I think, can be so useful and so motivating. 

So Paulina, thanks so much for your insights today. What is the best way for listeners to connect with you? 

Paulina: 

Well, I'm always happy to have people email me. My email is paulina@acadiaediting.com or you can find me on LinkedIn under Paulina Cossette. And I also have my own podcast, which is called “Leaving Academia: Becoming a Freelance Editor.” So that's a great way for you to get a sense of my personality and sense of humor, as we said earlier. So yeah, always happy to connect with anybody who's thinking of leaving or just wants a non-judgmental ally to talk with them. 

Leslie: 

Amazing. So listeners, I hope this helps to shed light on what it takes to build a 

successful business when you're coming from academia. And if you are looking to build your own editing or academic coaching business, please connect with Paulina!