Pivot When Needed if Self-Employed Ep 80

Being self-employed can be challenging at times. Especially when business demands, illness, staffing changes, or anything unless unpredictable occurs. In this episode, I discuss why it's important to be agile, nimble, and give yourself grace!

The good news? Your audience probably won't even know if you're off schedule.

I pull back the curtain on how pivoting swiftly has been key to my entrepreneurial ventures, especially through the unpredictable waves of COVID and staff turnovers.

From maintaining a content calendar to bouncing back after personal setbacks, I'll walk you through the resilience and grace that self-employment demands, all while keeping your business on course. 

I also offer two examples of how I've pivoted recently with my business. I discuss the impact of tweaking my podcast schedule, and a "softer" response to my 'Bootcamp with Brenda' course in conjunction with my own desires to evolve this online course. 

I hope this episode inspires you to give yourself space and grace to pivot in your business when needed.

******************************
15 LinkedIn Profile Tips for Coaches and Consultants

FREE Download at mellermarketing.com/list

This checklist provides 15 quick and easy ways to update your LinkedIn profile TODAY and help generate more leads for your coaching / consulting business.

**************************************
My name is Brenda Meller. I'm a LinkedIn coach, consultant, speaker, and author. My company is Meller Marketing and I help business professionals get a bigger slice of the LinkedIn pie.

Visit mellermarketing.com

Let's connect on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/brendameller
(click MORE to invite me to connect and mention you listened to my podcast)

Transcript

Brenda Meller: 1:02

One of the many benefits of being self-employed, it's that you can pivot when needed. Now don't get me wrong. I think it's important to have a content calendar and a strategy in place for the year, something that you can follow as a schedule, and something that you have. A plan. That's in place and it's almost like a roadmap. But I think about a roadmap and when we used to take road trips, right, we would have this map of where we were gonna go, but then you might see something interesting on your destination and wanna take a stop along the way, or the unexpected might happen you might blow a tire on your car, you might be running out of gas and there's no gas station in sight, you're getting hungry and it's not quite dinner time. So, whatever it is, sometimes you take detours from the plan and you're able to pivot right. So I like to think of it the same way within my business, and just being able to pivot is one of the perks that we have, because there's no boss standing over us that's saying, no, you can't divert from this schedule. There's no team that's relying on you. If you're self-employed, maybe you've got a VA or an intern, but really it's just you and you can determine your success and you can make changes to that plan if needed. And this, for me, applies to many of the things that I do, both postings on social media, the emails that I send out to my VIP email lists and even the podcast that you're listening here to today and I think the beauty of this is that you can pivot when needed and really pay close attention to your business, to your customers, and just give yourself grace. I think that's really important because being agile and nimble is important to your success.

Brenda Meller: 2:40

So some things may happen that will cause a pivot to occur. You might get sick. This happened to me. I got COVID over the holidays and I had a friend who just came down with the flu and we were sharing stories about how it really just took us down and we needed some time to recover and you could lose a good week or two from your business. You can still have things running in the background, but it does take away from a bit of that energy that we have right. So getting back up to speed can take some time.

Brenda Meller: 3:08

Another thing that could happen is you could lose a staff member, whether you have an intern or a VA, a virtual assistant, my intern. She graduated and she was looking for a job and she got a job and I started the process of recruiting for a new intern but it was taking a bit longer than expected. So I ended up kind of starting to ask around for a VA virtual assistant and I had a friend who was using someone who they really enjoyed working with. So I ended up signing up working with that person. But even then, once you get a new staff member in place, you've got some training to do, right To get them up to speed on your processes, and that can even slow you down a bit as you're trying to speed up, which is kind of ironic, but you do need to work through that process.

Brenda Meller: 3:48

And the other thing is you might have busier season for some of your other paid products. For example, you might have a big contract coming in for coaching or consulting services. It's not expected, but you'll take that right and it's definitely a part of being successful and being able to manage that workflow that's coming in. So maybe some project work is coming in that's pulling you away from the things that you're doing as an ongoing part of your business, whether it's your social media postings, your email, your podcasts, et cetera, right, it pulls you away. And I think it's okay to allow yourself to pivot and to give yourself some grace on those schedules and, to be honest, I gotta share this with you Nobody's really gonna notice if you go off schedule for a week or two and you might feel like, oh my gosh, my email subscribers are noticing I'm not sending anything.

Brenda Meller: 4:34

Or people are noticing on LinkedIn that I haven't been posting in a week. I gotta tell you they're not. They're not really noticing. There's so many other things out there it might take them a week or two to even notice. And they may reach out to you and say, hey, brenda, I haven't seen you post in a while. I'm not gonna send anything, okay. Or I haven't seen your emails. I wanted to make sure they weren't growing into spam. They may eventually reach out to you, but for a week or two they're probably not. You'll probably notice it, but they won't notice it, okay. So I do wanna say even this does happen.

Brenda Meller: 5:03

You shouldn't stop your communication plans entirely. You should have some type of a process in place. Or maybe you've got some future posting scheduled on social media. You've got an email schedule and plan in place and you know where you can skip a few in there. Or even in terms of podcasts, a lot of my podcasting friends will swear by doing podcast production in bulk and sitting down, whether it's on a Sunday or a Monday, and just knocking off four or five or six episodes and getting them pre-scheduled so they can add a little bit of buffer time in there. So, whatever it is, you don't want to stop your communication plan entirely, but I think, allow yourself the knowledge that you can slow down for a week or two while you're working through whatever it is the issue whether it's the illness, the staffing being busy with other client work so it's perfectly okay to go off, but just be aware that you're off of your regular plan and you need to get back into that as soon as is possible. So let me talk a bit about two particular scenarios that I've been working through recently, and you probably aren't even aware of these things, but I'm going to pull back the curtain and tell you what I did working through the process and my plan to get back into place, and hopefully this will inspire you as well.

Brenda Meller: 6:18

Now let's talk about my podcast. This episode that you're listening to is on my show that's called enthusiastically self-employed. My plan at launch was to do two podcast episodes every week and to publish those episodes. I started doing them on Mondays and Wednesdays and that's really been going great. And it was going great for a long time because I had an intern helping me out with the post-production and I've got a really large library of LinkedIn live interviews to pull from. But I also try to blend in solo episodes like these and I've started to do some LinkedIn profile mini audits as well. So there is some additional work to getting the episodes recorded, but a lot of the work, to be honest, is the post production getting them scheduled up on Buzzsprout and pushed out to the podcast platforms.

Brenda Meller: 7:01

Now I had a really great process in place and I always enjoyed doing the process first and then teaching it to my intern or my staff member, because I want to know everything through the process so I can give them guidance. But once I have that process, it's a really easy thing to do a handover. So, as I mentioned, my intern graduated, she started looking for a job. She got a job and I did not have a new person in place, so I found that VA, the virtual assistant, and at the time we'll talk about my course launch in a minute. But at the time I was getting into my webinars, which were leading up to my course launch, and I really needed to focus on what my top priority was for my business at the time and it was the webinars and the course launch, not the podcast. So I had a week or two over the past month I don't know if you've even noticed it, probably not right where my Monday and Wednesday episodes weren't always exactly on Monday morning and Wednesday morning. Sometimes there was a Monday afternoon and a Thursday midday.

Brenda Meller: 7:58

Sometimes I've skipped Wednesday episodes entirely, but I've at least tried to publish one episode a week during the past few weeks and I've still tried to keep on track with my content ratio and this is something I learned from Adam Shibley through the podcasting business school. Two thirds of my episodes I'm trying to move towards. Two thirds of those are expert positioning, where I am giving expert advice to all of you, and one third is interview style episodes. So I'm still trying to keep on track with that. But I have skipped a few dates. So I'm trying to get back into it again and this solo episode is getting me back into the swing of things and I figured why not use this example as content for my podcast to help all of you, right? So hopefully appreciate a little bit of a meta thing that we're doing here. Okay, so the second thing the first thing I talked to me was my podcast episodes and my schedule there. I'm getting back into the swing of things there.

Brenda Meller: 8:49

The second thing, as I alluded to, was my course launch, and I just did another launch of my program, which is called Bootcamp with Brenda, is designed for individuals who are experience rich, meaning age 40 plus, 50 plus or 60 plus and who are currently looking for a new job. And this time I decided to do a little bit of a change in the, the messaging, to specifically appeal to people who are working but looking for a new job. And that in itself was a bit of a challenge because the people I was trying to target and reach on LinkedIn, they really would not interact with my post because they're working but looking right. So it was a little bit of a challenge and I thought, going in here, this might be a better audience to work within, because my annual subscription, my annual membership, I should say, in the Bootcamp with Brenda program is a $997 investment. I do offer a couple different payment plans, but what I found over the past few years is that I was attracting people who are unemployed and actively job seeking in between successes. People who were working but looking was another part of the audience. And a third segment was people who were maybe still working but thinking about coaching or consulting or finding a new job, or maybe were already job seeking but starting to do some coaching and consulting and they were trying to figure out which path. So they were kind of split in the middle.

Brenda Meller: 10:12

So I decided in this past launch to really double down on the people that were working but looking and thinking that you know, these individuals might have more money, might have more budget available to them for the program and enrollment was a bit softer than I had expected. I'm not going to say worse, because I don't like the way that that sounds. Worse, it implies that they're not quality customers coming into my business and there were so many high value, high quality students who enrolled in my program and I'm going to serve them 110% of the value. We already had a welcome event and I've heard some very positive feedback from those individuals about their investment in this program and the messaging and my consistency and my clarity. So I'm really happy with the people that have enrolled in my program and I will continue to serve them. But it was a bit softer than expected and I was also finding, going through this launch, that I was being challenged with mixed audience messages Because this, this community of job seekers, is not the only individuals that I am serving.

Brenda Meller: 11:14

I'm also trying to book corporate clients to for LinkedIn team training, to bring me in to train their team on how to use LinkedIn for social selling, for personal brand development, for company brand awareness, and you can see here how this might interfere with a job search type of a message. Right, and at the beginning of the year I actually sat down and I did a monthly focus calendar where I decided one topic that was going to be my key focus for every month and I am shifting between multiple audiences in here. Certain times of the year, certain months of the year, I should say I'll be targeting individuals who are job seekers. Another portion of the year I'll be focusing on promoting my marketing with Mellor program, which is really designed for people who are either self-employed or don't have a lot of marketing expertise, that are looking to learn marketing from me. So it's not a LinkedIn focus, it's a marketing focus. Another point in time I'll be focusing on a LinkedIn training program that is specifically targeted to sole entrepreneurs, small business owners, really people who are coaches and consultants, speakers and authors, and then I also have my team training that I mentioned to you earlier. So those are corporate clients.

Brenda Meller: 12:22

I do do some one-off LinkedIn coaching. I'm not really including that as part of my 2024 calendar, but people can book those Power Hour sessions with me when they like. And finally, I do public speaking and I'm trying to increase the amount of speaking I'm doing at conferences and events, paid of course, and trying to work that into the calendar as well. So I do have many things that are shifting in my calendar throughout the year and I've been trying to determine for this particular program, the Bootcamp with Brenda program went to move it to what's referred to as an evergreen, meaning my students can enroll any time, whereas in the past my first two cohorts I had a cart open date and a cart close date where you can sign up and get all these great bonuses and everybody moved through the program at the same time. There's a point in time when we, as course creators, we choose to move some of our programs to an evergreen, so your students can enroll any time throughout the year. There may be some of the bonuses, for example group coaching that's no longer available if you're not offering that on an ongoing basis. So there is certainly an appeal to doing a cart open and a cart close, but from a convenience standpoint, I've got this great Bootcamp program and there's really no reason I can't offer it to my students any time when they run it and roll throughout the year. So I've been trying to determine that.

Brenda Meller: 13:40

So again, I had a bit of a softer launch than expected. Right, I've been challenged a bit with my mixed audience messages and how to not alienate my corporate clients when I'm doing these job search programs. And then I also had a bit of feedback from a few individuals who were on my webinar about the payments and just you know that this was, you know, not something they could afford at this time, and I did do a 12 payment option in the past for this program. So all of these things together got my marketing mind around it and I decided what to do was that? I decided to do two things. The first was that I added a new payment method of a 12 monthly payments for my students, so they could now enroll at a lower price rate per month and they could pay over the series of 12 months in the program. I also announced that enrollment would be ongoing and they could enroll anytime, but the sooner they enroll, the more of those group coaching sessions that they would have access to, because at the current time I'm only planning on doing the group coaching for the next three months. After that point they would have to sign up for a VIP upgrade to get the ability to work with me one-on-one for coaching. So I currently have a message out there around that and I'll probably do a reminder message periodically on that. And I've also added in a 15 minute discovery call for anyone who's interested in the program and I've gotten a couple of people to sign up on that as well. So I think these things are gonna help me to move this successfully to an evergreen model for the course and to also address the mixed audience messages that are out there.

Brenda Meller: 15:16

So that's what a little bit I've been doing behind the scenes and there's a good likelihood you weren't even aware of these things, right? But these are the some of the things that we can do when we are self-employed listening to our audience, listening to our business and also paying attention to our strategy overall and deciding when we need to pivot and shift and kind of evolve our business. So that's about me. What about you, I wanna ask do you give yourself grace and allow yourself to pivot from your annual roadmap? You should, my friend, because that's one of the reasons that we are enthusiastically self-employed. Right, we do have the ability to shape and form our business, paying attention to what's happening in our personal lives, paying attention to what's happening in our customers' lives and also just kind of going with the flow of things, so to speak. Hopefully, this episode inspires you to do so and I'd love to hear any feedback if it has done so. Until next time, my friends, take care and I'll see you on LinkedIn.