Web Pro Savvy
Web Pro Savvy is a podcast for freelance web designers and developers, hosted by Cathy Sirvatka. You'll hear interviews with experienced freelance web pros about their business operations, the services they offer, and the types of clients they work with. They openly share their stories and pull back the curtain on how they achieve success so that you can boost your own business.
Web Pro Savvy
Unlocking Freelance Success: Time Management and Strategy with Julie DeLuca Collins
Unlock the secrets to building a thriving freelance business as we sit down with expert business coach Julie DeLuca Collins. Have you ever wondered how successful entrepreneurs reverse-engineer their goals to align their daily operations with long-term visions? Julie shares her invaluable insights on time management, defining services, identifying your ideal customer base, and crafting effective pricing strategies. Get ready to take notes on the top mistakes freelancers make and learn actionable steps to evaluate and enhance your business practices.
Julie’s career journey is nothing short of inspiring. From retail management at Macy’s to becoming a Chief Innovation Officer at a multimillion-dollar educational company, Julie’s unique path has equipped her with profound insights into sales, marketing, and business operations. With a strong passion for empowering women in business, she transitioned to coaching during the pandemic. Julie has helped countless clients master business fundamentals, such as LLC formation and email marketing, all while maintaining a strategic vision for long-term success.
Tune in to discover how to create a successful business strategy and achieve time and income freedom. We explore the importance of setting clear business goals, maintaining work-life balance, and defining your niche to maximize your client base. Julie’s practical tips on effective time management, setting boundaries, and building productive habits are sure to resonate with entrepreneurs at any stage. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to gain valuable knowledge and motivation to push your freelance business to new heights.
What is the core foundation of your business? I bet you have a vision and a passion for your business, but do you have systems in place to achieve your goals that are in alignment with your foundation? Clarity of time, services, ideal customer base or niche your offerings, goals for your income and pricing these are all foundational considerations to running a business that you feel comfortable in and that attracts and keeps happy clients. Imagine the ideal way you want your business to run and then putting systems in place that are aligned with that vision. This is the consummate freelance business structure.
Cathy Sirvatka:My guest today is Julie DeLuca Collins. She is a business coach who works with entrepreneurs to plan and strategize how they run their business. She addresses not only the services they offer but how they're delivered. Today, julie talks about how to reverse engineer your business goals to see how you are actually doing business. She talks about creating a plan that embraces your best strategies and business practices and about developing daily habits that keep you from becoming overwhelmed. Julie tells us the top two things she sees freelancers doing that are working against them, and she shares two next steps for all of us to do to assess why our business is where it is, for better or worse. Here we go. Welcome to the Web Pro Savvy Podcast. This is your host, Cathy Sirvatka. S as in Sam I-R V. As in Victor A-T-K-A. All right, julie welcome to the show.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:Thank you, Kathy, for having me. I am thrilled to be able to be here with you today.
Cathy Sirvatka:Oh, I'm so happy to have you. We had such a great conversation and I got so excited about the things you were talking about, because they're business and for those of us freelancers who run our own business and we know how to do web stuff, maybe don't know how to do the business stuff so well and could use a few pointers, so this is going to be a good episode, I think.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:Well, thank you again and you know I geek out at having these conversations. It's sort of my, I've discovered, is my little ikigai to have. It's what I'm passionate about, is what I love doing, is it lights me up and I'm good at it. So you know it's. It's a great thing in conversation that we'll have.
Cathy Sirvatka:That's really cool, thanks. So can you tell us a little about your professional background and what got you to where you are now?
Julie DeLucca-Collins:Well, let's see. I will tell you that I have been an entrepreneur at heart. My first business was when I was 12 years old, and I'm not going to go into a long detail on it. However, I went the traditional route. Most people have a path that they want to follow and I decided well, you know, I'm going to be a teacher and I have families, members that have been teachers, and it was just the thing that I saw myself doing. And I started teaching preschool, kindergarten, and I loved it. I had a lot of fun, but it was exhausting and there was a piece that wasn't, was missing, and I thought there's gotta be more. And I got another job, working as a junior high youth minister at my church, and I love that. I love middle school kids, love them, and people either love them or hate them. And that was a really, you know, incredible time for me to learn a lot about creating long-term plans, creating a curriculum, being able to then organize a team of volunteers, organize events. So that was a great experience. And then I didn't know what I wanted to do after that.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:I eventually was hired by a national educational company. One of the things that they looked at is that I had retail experience and I was again. Another one of my experiences is I was an assistant manager for a retail one of the largest retail chains federated department stores, macy's and I love doing that and I learned a lot about profitability, about products, about marketing, and all of that helped me when I was recruited for this educational company. I came in to be a center director for a tutoring company and I love the fact that I can meld my retail experience and sales with my educational background. And also I was making an impact in the lives of the people that we were serving. I went for the first couple of years and learned the business and grew through the ranks, became very successful, one of the top performing centers, and then I got promotion after promotion. I spent over 10 years with that company and it was an incredible experience because they had a purpose in not only servicing students but also to grow people from within, to mentor them, to help them. This company is also a franchise company, so I learned a lot about opening a business. What does it take to have a business plan? What are your marketing dollars? So how do you create a marketing plan, a sales plan? How do you make it work together? How do you create an operational system? So all of that was again things that were like depositing knowledge and experience into my belt.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:I left that organization because I was recruited for another multimillion dollar company that was in the education space. She was the owner and founder, was someone who started to make a difference, and she was a teacher but didn't have the business know-how, and she knew that. I brought that to the table. She was looking to expand. She was making the type of money and income that she was a multimillion dollar company, but she wasn't running it as you should, so her growth had become stagnant and that's where my expertise came in. I was with that company for many, many years and I grew with the company. The company continued to expand. We expanded to many different states and I love the work that I was doing.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:By the time I left that company, I was the chief innovation officer and the reason that the title sort of was one that talked about. I was into the development of new business, but I was also in the operations of the existing business. I was not. I straddled both of those.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:I had been also thinking for many years because, as I was developing new programs for the company that I wanted to do more in helping women and my goal was that sometime in the future I was going to leave and maybe not retire, but I was going to pivot to working with executives, working with women in the corporate world, because one of the things that I kept hearing from individuals as I grew through the ranks of multiple companies is wow, that's right, great Congratulations. I wish I was as confident as you are, and I thought you don't know, I am not that confident and yes, there is a level of confidence, but I don't always feel it, I don't always have it together, I don't always know, but the thing that is that catalyst for me is that I keep going. I don't stay in place when I don't feel confident. I take the first step and that motion creates the momentum to build my confidence, because I practice, I fail, I innovate, I change, I become better. So that has been really what the journey has been.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:Now, at the beginning of the pandemic, I got the call. My company was hit incredibly hard with schools closing down and they had to make the tough decision that a couple of us in the executive suite had to be offered a separation package and at first I thought, oh, I know exactly what I'm going to do. I'm going to help women in this corporate career and become more confident and grow in their careers, et cetera. So I set out to do coaching, in that I had gotten again coaching certifications throughout the years, mainly for my own edification.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:And as I started to work with women and help them in their career, I started to get a lot of people come to me and said, hey, I know that you worked with a company. Do I need an LLC to start a company? Hey, I don't know what email marketing is. How do I do that? Or, wow, how do I price myself? And I thought, oh, this is something that comes really easily to me, I love to talk about, I love creating the strategy and plans. And then, all of a sudden, my business started to evolve to doing more of the business coaching because productivity. To doing more of the business coaching because productivity, time management, the skills of strategizing and building a clear, concise plan for your business and how you're going to run it, not only in the sales and marketing, but also in the delivery of services. It's something that I'm incredibly passionate about. So this is how I got here A long road, but every experience has deposited into my knowledge bank that allows me to be better at what I do.
Cathy Sirvatka:Wow, yeah, I feel like a lot of us have that kind of path to where we are now. We didn't take the straight path our parents or grandparents used to take, where it's like you had the same job out of college, you went till you retired, boom, all was that, was it. I think I read something that said we have like five to seven different careers in our lifetime at this point. So absolutely yeah, so that's really cool. So now I know how you became a business coach, which makes sense because you have a ton of business background and I love that. Now, when we talked before, you mentioned something about core foundational elements in a business, especially freelance business, as we're talking to freelancers, business, as we're talking to freelancers. So what I want to say is or are what are core foundational elements, or do we have one core foundational element for the business? What is that?
Julie DeLucca-Collins:Yeah. So you know, one of the things that I tell individuals is that you really have to reverse engineer your success For many freelancers, entrepreneurs. You have a vision and you have a passion and you have a great skillset, but you don't understand how they kind of meld together and can work together. And the most important thing is, if you have the vision that you want the time freedom, you want the income freedom, right? What does that mean? Understanding, really, if I want to have time freedom, what does that mean? How many hours do I want to work? When do I create that intentional margin so that I don't leave a job that was overworking me to all of a sudden working 24-7 in my own business, right? So, having that clarity, number one. Number two also it's important for you to know that if you have a goal for income for your business, you need to pay your bills and you want to have extra income to be able to travel, save into your retirement. What does that mean on a practical manner? How many clients do you need to have? What is the right way to price yourself? To create packages so that you're not working trading dollars for time and hours like most?
Julie DeLucca-Collins:You know, you're not an hourly person, but you're someone who is working on a per project basis. And then you are creating systems that not only continue to bring in new people by making them aware and you nurturing the relationships, but you also, as you're delivering services and this is where a lot of entrepreneurs go wrong you get into delivery mode. All of a sudden, you have an influx of clients. Oh great, Everything is wonderful. I have an influx of clients, Let me go and do the work, Let me design the thing, Let me do this. And yet they stop doing the work that is required to continue to bring more people in, create continued awareness, strengthen the relationships and build that know like and trust factor that is incredibly important for us to have in order to grow our practices, our businesses, our side hustle, whatever it might be, when it comes to doing this freelance stuff.
Cathy Sirvatka:So clarity of time goals for your income, and then systems in place.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:Absolutely Clarity in what you do, what you offer, who do you serve. And I think that this is the other thing that many people get stuck on. They don't ask is this something that people want? We assume that, just because we're good at it, that that's what people are looking for. Number two having the clarity of who is your person.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:You know, my mentor, pat Flynn, says the riches are in the niches and we hate that. Like I have to niche down and by the way, I've been there, I've been like, oh, I can help any entrepreneur. The problem with that is that when we don't have clarity on a very specific segment of who we serve, then we're speaking to so many different people that our message is not clear enough. You're speaking to everyone, you're speaking to no one. So it's very important and for me that was a turning point in my business. I remember thinking well, I'm a coach, I'm a holistic coach, I do mindfulness, I can do business, I can do career coaching. So there were so many different layers when I talked about what I did. Nobody understood what I was doing, there was no clarity and I felt and again, this is that scarcity mentality I felt like if I picked one, if I talked to one segment, that I would not get any business, because I was kind of crossing out and saying, okay, not you, not you, not you. But what has actually happened, kathy, and I think that this is really important. I actually am able to service more people because there's clarity.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:And, yes, my ideal person, the person that I serve, is that woman entrepreneur who is overwhelmed, maybe in midlife, and is not sure what comes first, second or third, and they're working in their business but not on it. They're not growing it, they still don't have consistent income. From time to time, they're worried about whether or not they're going to be a success. Right, they stay up at night and think, okay, I need this, and then they download the free thing and then they're not sure what to do and they have so many downloads they get confused. Like I should do this, I should do that. That's the person right. However, if you look at my client roster, I have male entrepreneurs. I also work with incredible gifted professionals who are in the career space and still need some coaching gifted professionals who are in the career space and still need some coaching. And again, it has given me the freedom to be able to decide yes, I can work with this person, I can serve them, I can support them in how to be able to design better services.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:Okay, well, I resonated with everything you said and shout out to Pat Flynn, because I also have followed him for years and years, took a couple courses with him. He is very smart and very successful. That helped my business as well in the expansion as well. So, yes, you need to surround yourself with individuals like this show is giving you a lot of content, is giving you individuals that have been there. So pick wisely, pick, pick the places where you can gain the support in this journey.
Cathy Sirvatka:Okay, Wow, that's really good. That's a lot to chew on. And so those foundational elements. For someone who didn't take business courses, except for here and there, how does a business strategy work then in your foundation? Like, what is okay? What is a business strategy first, and how many do we have?
Julie DeLucca-Collins:You know that is, and here's my perspective in this. You know some people may disagree with me, but I really think that number one you need to be clear on, again, what the goals. What do you want to accomplish? Like, if you want to, for me, my first goal was to replace my corporate income. That was the first goal. So then deciding like okay, if I want to replace my corporate income, what does that amount to per month? Right. And then deciding, like okay, if this is the amount of income I want to bring in, what are my offers? Be very clear on what you're offering. And if you're a service provider, you're building websites or you're a copywriter, again you want to be clear as to what your pricing is. And this is one of the things that I actually go into a little more in depth with my clients is deciding, like what are your expenses, what's your overhead, and then creating pricing that fits within the market demand right, but also that gives you profitability and allows you to pay yourself first. So that's part of the strategy is understanding what you're going to offer, how much you're going to offer it for and what timeframe do you have to deliver this, and then you start to create that customer journey, understanding how people find you, understanding how people start to interact with you, understanding in how people then build a closer bond to you and start to say, oh, she's really good, I need that Right. And then how do you and you need to have a process for and this is part of the strategy is how do you then invite people to work with you? Do you have somewhere in your website where they can just click and purchase a service, or do you have to have a conversation with them? Or do you send a proposal? All of that is part of the strategy that you need to create.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:And then, as you're moving along, here's where people go wrong. They create a strategy, they start to implement it imperfectly, because we're all going to implement them perfectly, and then they don't have the results they want and they start to become overwhelmed. They kind of tune out, they're like it's not working. It didn't. You know, I've been doing this and it's not working. Instead of continuing to stay your course, measure progress and give yourself the grace that you've come very far.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:I have a. I have a client who started her business and she's been moving along. She's talking to people, she's networking and, by the way I wanna say social media followers are not clients. However, social media is a great way for people to become aware of you, so she's built an incredible community so far that are following her, interacting with her stuff. So, again, all of these are part of the attraction and engagement strategy for her business.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:But she is trying to launch a website and she got stuck on. Actually, what should she say on her website, right? So she started to spiral overwhelmed, came in and, instead of working the plan, then all of a sudden, three days go by, she hasn't worked her business and she's like feeling bad about herself because she's not where. Oh, I'm not a success, I'm going to step back. And then the more that she steps back and it's in this overwhelm the more that she's not working in her business and the more that her business is not moving forward. That the strategy of creating the daily habits, the daily to-dos that move you closer to the goals that you have, is incredibly important as well. Daily habits.
Cathy Sirvatka:That's really the key to life. I feel like it's true. It's true in life, it's true, in business for sure. So daily. Does the strategy then? Is that something? First of all, is it something you document? Do you document your strategies?
Julie DeLucca-Collins:Absolutely. A track number grows. A track number is something that, and again, people you know. For instance, I'm going to give you an example. You may have a weight loss goal and you're like I want to lose 10 pounds. So you weigh yourself the first week, you've lost a pound. You weigh yourself the second week you gain two. You come to the third week and you're still working at kind of losing weight. But you stop weighing yourself right and you stop tracking and all of a sudden you're not in the food plan or in the health journey that you were. You're starting to look at what's new, what can I do? This is not working, whereas if you consistently know that numbers and data is just data, it's just informing you, is giving you a direction and allowing you to recalibrate if need be right, and then, if you continue the process, then those numbers are going to help to guide you in the right direction.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:For me, the times and it's very easy when I don't track certain metrics in my business you can see that we're kind of a little bit off the rails. So having the right metrics, the key performance indicators and those key performance indicators is not a reflection of who you are. We assign so many times we assign our value to the numbers or whether or not we're making the numbers. Our value doesn't come from that. The numbers are not good or bad, they're just neutral. So, knowing that your value comes from, maybe that interaction you had with that client where you delivered something for them that they really needed, keep track of that, keep track of your wins. These things help to improve your confidence, help to keep you motivated to keep going and allow you to then continue to practice the habits, the daily habits, that make a change in your life and business. So, yeah, keep track of those numbers.
Cathy Sirvatka:Okay, all right, that's really good. So the strategies that we document and we track metrics, which makes sense. I love the weight analogy. That makes sense to me. We talked about systems, so you need to have systems in place to make the strategies happen.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:Yes, and systems. By the way, a lot of people, a lot of people number one shy away from routines, from the boring stuff in their business because it's boring. As entrepreneurs, we tend to be very creative. We like to do the boring stuff in their business Because it's boring. As entrepreneurs, we tend to be very creative. We like to do the fun stuff. However, that's not necessarily where you want to spend your time.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:Part of your plan as an entrepreneur is knowing specifically how you are spending your time, creating an ideal calendar for yourself, because there's going to be two types of tasks, especially if you're starting out, especially if you're solopreneur, a service provider, that it's only you. You are both the marketing arm of your business, you are the sales side of your business. You're also the delivery, the service delivery, right. So you're going to have to create. And, by the way, I used to think when I was in corporate and I started to kind of explore this concept for my life and my career, I thought having an ideal calendar would make it less, would give me less ability to be spontaneous, it would take away my freedom. However, having an ideal calendar actually provides me with more freedom. It allows me to be able to say, you know, for instance, friday, my ideal calendar.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:I don't work Fridays. Now I'm moving away from working on Fridays. My business is only going to run Monday through Thursday. That was an intentionality. So if I'm only working four days, what are the priorities that need to happen? Delivery of services to my clients is number one. Number two I want to go ahead and continue to market my business. Number three I want to go ahead and continue to get people to be aware and nurture the existing relationships. So all of these things need to happen. So I have to then allocate time.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:Kathy, today is Tuesday. If you look at my calendar, in my ideal calendar, tuesdays are podcasting days, days that I reserve for this type of endeavor, either recording with you or having people on my shows, right. So, having that I wake up on Tuesdays and I know exactly what my day is going to look like On Wednesday, thursdays those are my delivery days, the times in which I work with clients and maybe I have some networking events or other things worked in there. And then Mondays is where I plan my business. I do some networking, but I also do some of that creative writing, and what happens is I am setting up myself so that I am not running in this overwhelm like, oh my gosh, what am I supposed to do?
Julie DeLucca-Collins:And then you're switch tasking because your brain can't go from doing something that is very right brain to something left brain. So understanding the different tasks and which ones allow you to create momentum, allow you to stay in flow, is going to be very key. And the thing is be aware as well that in these processes, if you're an entrepreneur, you need to document what you do and how you do it, even if you are going to continue to be a solopreneur. But the reason you're doing it is because you're going to come to a point in which maybe you need to delegate a task your social media or sending emails or your calendar.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:If you can delegate and have a process in which you're like, oh, I need to train the VA, my virtual assistant and how to do this. But, oh my gosh, when am I going to find the time for that? I really need her to do this. But it's faster if I just do it right. Document from the beginning, film yourself, use something like Loom in which you film yourself doing it, and then this way, you have the process documented and then you make the task replicatable and the ability to delegate. It will give you the time back for you to then do what you do best.
Cathy Sirvatka:Yeah, um, so it sounded like that was again so much you're, everything you're saying is so great, um, and it sounds like your schedule is sort of set up as batch processing, like you've got today, we do this tomorrow, I do this Now for a web designer. That can be a little tricky just because we are so project based and customers, clients we work with, we're doing communications with them. It's not always scheduled, you know, it's a little tricky sometimes, I think. So batch processing is something you could also say a half day here's three hours on Tuesdays that I do email marketing and then the rest of the day I'm available for clients, or the rest of the day I'm working on project A, something like that. Yeah.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:You know, kathy, here's a thing that I want to share with you, because what you just said, yes, the batch processing, maybe half a day is set for this but also it's important that you, as the CEO of your life and business, you train people on the expectations, on what your process is for things. If you are working on projects, for individuals, for customers, yes, there's going to be that need to communicate, but here's what I'm going to encourage people, create the habits. So, for instance, for me, 9 am is typically my processing time. What do I mean by processing? That's a time in which I've been awake, I've been doing a couple of different things, I've been reading my little morning routine, but when I come to my desk, I open my calendar first and I look to see what's ahead of me. Number one, number two I go through my email, and that's the only time my email is open in the morning is I go through and I look through. Okay, what are the things that I need to address right here, right now, that are a priority, right?
Julie DeLucca-Collins:If there's something that is going to take me and I said this to you earlier if it's going to take me more than three minutes to do, that's not a response to an email. That's actually a task that goes into my to-do list and that list is something I work off during that processing time. If I don't finish that, then it goes into my afternoon processing time as I wrap up my day my afternoon processing time as I wrap up my day. The thing about this as well is that we get to say and, by the way, I have tons of clients that are working on maybe launching a website or creating a process, or have questions on something that we had I make myself available to them. They can find me on Slack. We have a Slack channel. That's our internal communication.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:But I check Slack and they know and this is the expectation I set with them hey, these are the times that you can expect to get a response from me. Also, I train them. If you need me, the best way, if it's an emergency and you need me right away, is you text me, because I will see that first. Number two, I will check Slack more than I will check email, and if you send me an email, then you can expect that I will get back to you within 24 hours of you sending the email. Having that expectation makes you the person who is in control of your calendar, as opposed to your calendar being in control of you. I love that, so that is going to be incredibly important.
Cathy Sirvatka:Yeah, I love that and I love the boundaries. I also especially love and this is something I did learn early on in my own business, my own freelance business is you have to train your clients. You have to train them in what to expect. Don't give them the reins. Tell them this is how I work, this is how the project's going to go, this is how we communicate and you set them up Like you said. You give those expectations. Then you can possibly do things like take your Friday off, like I don't work Fridays because these are my work days. Now for email for web designers, just because that was an example. I actually do check mine three times a day. I check in the morning first thing, I check in the middle to see if anybody anything blew up, and then again in the evening just to see if anybody anything blew up yeah and then again, and then again in the evening, just to see if you know.
Cathy Sirvatka:If there, I just like to know what's going on. Most of my email, you know, like the rest of us, is spam and all that kind of stuff. But you know, if somebody wrote me a client wrote me and I'm working on their project I want to know what's going on.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:So no, and you define that based on what your business is. You know, I'm not sure if this was a real or if this was a story in my Instagram, but you can actually go into if you have Gmail, or I'm sure that you can do this also with your Outlook, but you can go in and you can create a rule, and I created this, so I set it up so that if an email has the word unsubscribe, it immediately goes into my delete, not my trash, but it goes into a delete folder. And this is not the promotions folder, and Gmail does that and they creates the promotions folder. But I go in and I then look and I say who do I really want to hear from here? And then, on a weekly basis, I can go in and say, oh, unsubscribe me from all of these, right? Or? Or? Or move them all into trash, right? So then I am not clogging my email because we end up downloading the thing, signing up for this, sending this, and and again, our inboxes can become out of control. And, by the way, I want to.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:I want to put this out there because this is something that I read and that blew my mind, and the reality is that when you are working on something and you stop to check email or you stop to check a notification. My notifications are always off on my phone. When you stop doing and you get distracted, it takes you 17 minutes for you to get to the level of concentration that you were before you got distracted. So if you are working on a project and you have your email dinging every two seconds, you are pulling yourself out and you're not being as efficient as possible. So that's an incredible thing that people can kind of associate and see and start to measure and start to take small tiny steps to change, to evolve from those habits that are not serving you.
Cathy Sirvatka:Yeah, context shifting. Multitasking is not real. No, not at all. And that number of 17 minutes is huge. That's even more than I thought.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:Yeah, absolutely, and I remember seeing this and I've seen it in so many different. I actually went through some one of the books that I was reading actually had the citations and I'm like you know what I'm going to go? Look at this and I'm like, wow, it's 17 minutes. It doesn't seem like it's possible, but it is. That's what the research is telling us and really, the reality is that we can get sidetracked so easily, especially because there's going to be things in your business that are hard.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:I had a task yesterday that I needed to do. I pushed it from my morning to the afternoon and I was about to close out and I thought, no, I need to do that. And I thought, well, it's going to take me forever. And oh my gosh, I don't know how to do it and I have to figure it out. And, by the way, I was talking myself out of getting started with it and I said you know what? I'm going to set a timer. I'm going to start working on it for three minutes. Whatever I can get done in three minutes, Great. And if I do it, and who knows? And then I'll move on, but at least I've started it In three minutes. My timer went off and I was kind of in the groove and I'm like, ok, I'm going to keep going. That's a little tiny habit, because if we want to rely on motivation to run our business, you're not going to be able to run your business successfully. You need to rely on habits that keep you going and that create the momentum.
Cathy Sirvatka:Oh, I love that. Action creates motivation, doesn't it Not the other way around?
Julie DeLucca-Collins:Absolutely, and for many of us, you know, skills, confidence and motivation kind of feed off of each other. I'm a tiny habit certified coach, so I love talking about this. Behavior design Number one is for us in. Let's go back to the, to the losing weight example. At the beginning of the year, everybody's like I want to lose weight, I'm going to go to the gym, I'm going to get in shape, right? First of all, it's not a very clear goal, it's not very specific. But fine, you're going to get in shape, whatever that means. You're going to go to the gym that first week in January and you're very motivated because it's a brand new year. Brand new year, new. You right, and you start working. You're at the gym for an hour every day and you're like, oh, this is great.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:The second week, your child is sick, or you're sick, or something comes up. You don't go to the gym and you're like, oh, I'll go after or I'll do this. Then all of a sudden, life starts to happen. Your motivation, which is what got you started, is gone, and then the task is hard. When the task is hard, we don't want to jump into that. And then brain starts to protect us. Right, our reptilian brain goes into. Oh my gosh, you're going to be really sore if you go to the gym. Oh, forget it. You only have a half an hour. It's not going to make an impact to go to the gym for half an hour. You were supposed to be there for an hour. That's what you committed to. Oh, you didn't go to the gym yesterday. Well, what's the point? You might as well stop going. That's how our brain works.
Cathy Sirvatka:Yeah, I know that's how my brain works, yeah.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:And, by the way, that's humanity. That's how all of our brain works. Our brain is programmed to keep us protected because that's how the evolution pattern right. When we were in the caves, we were being protected from the, from the cyber tooth tigers, and our brain would say don't go outside the cave, or what was that noise? Oh, my God, you better be alert, alert, alert.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:Now we don't have to, but still, all of these things like working out of the gym, alert, alert, alert, that's hard. It's hard, right. But if we say, hey, I'm going to make a commitment to go to the gym and I'm gonna go to the gym and my goal is to just go in and I'm gonna maybe do 10 reps of two exercises, right, doable. Sometimes you're gonna go and you're like, oh, I could probably stay a little longer, I could probably do a little bit more of this. The more that you start to see your success, the more that you're going to spend time doing the task, and that's where motivation starts to come in. But it's not going to come in when something is hard.
Cathy Sirvatka:Yes, I can attest to that myself. But, like you said, I think that's most of us right. That's the human condition. Yeah, oh my gosh, this has been great. Hey, what is the biggest mistake you see freelancers making?
Julie DeLucca-Collins:The biggest mistake is definitely not prioritizing. Right, and here's the thing. You make goals for your business. You want to have X number of clients. You want to whatever it might be. But are your goals really aligned to your priorities? Right, if my priority is to grow my business to X amount of income? Right, and that means that I have to do this, this and this to move my needle forward, and yet I don't schedule it, I don't make the time, I don't prioritize it. Then it's difficult to and you're not congruent. You're telling yourself you want this, but you're not prioritizing. So you're in this cognitive dissonance that doesn't match and then it robs you of your motivation and your confidence in doing the work. So that's number one. The other thing and I know you know, as graphic designers, people that work in projects. This is a little harder, but here's what I want you to do when it comes to business, which is a higher level, right, the projects that you do for your clients. Those are your delivery, delivery of services. But in business, you also have process-based goals and project-based goals.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:Many entrepreneurs spend their time doing the projects for their business. I'm going to launch a YouTube channel. I'm going to fix my website. I need to do a nurture sequence. Yes, do they need to be done in your business? Of course they need to be done, but figure out what the process is first.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:Set up the goals, but figure out what the process is first. Set up the goals. I need to put myself out there a new podcast so that people become aware of me, and my goal is that I'm going to do two podcasts per month. That's a process, right. And then you start to create actions that support that process goal and then you can actually tangibly say, oh, look at how I'm moving the needle forward. And that's a lot of where entrepreneurs really struggle that you're not prioritizing. Your priorities don't match your calendar, your calendars doesn't match your values and you're all over the place and you are living by default instead of by design place and you are living by default instead of by design. You're running your business by oh shiny and by the seat of your pants and you're not actually doing it in an intentional manner in which you can measure your progress and see the things that you're accomplishing.
Cathy Sirvatka:You're living by default, not by design. So it's about everything has to be intentional yeah, absolutely. And congruent Int has to be intentional yeah, absolutely.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:And congruent Intentionality changes everything. Yeah, absolutely.
Cathy Sirvatka:Yeah, so that that's really good piece of advice. I was going to say what then? I think I know the answer now, but what would be the number one thing that we should all run off and do right now, when we're done listening? What should we do first for our business, if we haven't already?
Julie DeLucca-Collins:If so, we and I'm not sure when this is coming out, kathy, but I think that this is an exercise that I do at the end of the year as I'm planning for my new year. I also encourage anyone that this is something that you can do. Anytime is. I want you to go back and I want you to look at what your calendar looked like three months ago, because I can guarantee you that whatever was on your calendar is actually what is creating the results for your business today.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:Do a time audit how are you spending your time? So, if you are in these bunch of little projects or you don't have any new people that you are getting in front of and that was not something that was in your calendar and maybe you don't have a lot of clients today, I can see that. So start to assess and go and audit your time. And number two create a clear vision, create the goals that get you closer to that vision and then create the actions that move you closer to your goals. Those would be the things that I advise people to do right now.
Cathy Sirvatka:Oh, that's great. I like all of this. I'm going to run off and do everything. I'm going to do my now. Oh, that's great. I like all of this. I'm going to run off and do everything. I'm going to do my time assessment. For sure, I need to audit my own time, and probably it's just something that would be one of those metrics that you want to be checking into. Anyway, I would think yeah absolutely.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:And again your metrics. There's two types of metrics and that's another conversation for another day. But you're going to have your leading metrics and your lagging metrics. How much revenue you brought in, that's a lagging metric. Leading metric is how many people did you present your program to? How many proposals did you send out? How many new people did you network with? That's leading people? Did you network with that's leading? When you track your leading and you have specific goals for your leading metrics, then you're going to see your lagging numbers move.
Cathy Sirvatka:Oh my gosh, that's so good. Oh my gosh, Julie, I could keep talking with you for hours. This is really good information. Thank you so much for joining us today. You're welcome.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:I can't believe our time is done. You've been a great host. I really love, like I said, geeking out and talking about this, and it is very fun to be able to just provide individuals with maybe an aha moment here that will help them get closer to their goals and their dreams and living the life they've imagined.
Cathy Sirvatka:Yeah, oh, that's so good. Thank you so much. We'll talk again soon. I hope we can talk again soon.
Julie DeLucca-Collins:No, absolutely Anytime, and thank you again for hosting us, kathy.
Cathy Sirvatka:If you're looking for that freelance inspo you need subscribe to this podcast. Then share it with someone else, because who doesn't need inspiration?
