Treasa Edmond: 0:00

Welcome back to the Boss Responses podcast and day five with our guest co-host, Amy Ragland. When Amy started freelancing in 2002, digital marketing wasn't a thing yet. Social media didn't exist, the phrase lead magnet hadn't been coined. She started her freelance journey writing copy and content for old school hard copy materials like brochures, magazines and physical newsletters. Over the next 15 years, Amy freelanced part-time on the side while working and raising her daughters. She decided to make the jump to full-time freelance in 2017 and, as she has not looked back, today she writes content and copy for the financial services industry, crafting content for wealth management firms, banks and wealth tech providers through her company, luminary Financial Content LLC.

Treasa Edmond: 0:53

Today, we're going to learn more about Amy, how she got started, how she manages clients and some of the tools she uses to make her work easier. Let's get right into that conversation. If you're a freelancer, business owner or anyone who deals with clients, you're in the right place. I'm your host, teresa Edmond. I've been dealing with clients and running my business for nearly two decades and in that time I've dealt with my share of doubt, imposter syndrome and not knowing what to say when a client asks a question I wasn't ready for. I created this podcast to empower you with the boss responses you need to grow your business. Each week, my guest co-host and I will bring you five episodes packed with practical insights. Monday through Thursday, we answer your questions, and Fridays we dive deep to explore how our co-host embraced their role as the boss of their business. Welcome to Boss Responses, amy. We really appreciate you being here this week.

Amy Ragland: 1:59

Thank you so much. I mean this is really interesting and fun to think through some of these questions.

Treasa Edmond: 2:04

Yeah, it is it is. I remember being there and having those questions and not having anyone to answer them. I like to give back. That's what I like to do. All right, tell us a little bit about you and what you do.

Amy Ragland: 2:18

So I am a full-time freelance writer and my niche is in financial services. So I work with financial advisors, big financial planning firms and banks to write basically anything that needs words attached to it. I know a lot of writers say they're content writers or they're copywriters. I do a little bit of both sides, probably more content oriented but a little bit of copy. And then for some of my clients I also do more operational type, say that they need a manual, for I have a big advisor firm that I work with that they have about 800 advisors on their platform, so I'll do some more internal documentation and processes and things like that. So my work is varied and interesting and there's never a dull moment, so that's a good thing. I live in Wichita, kansas, and I am married and we have two teenage daughters, so that is always an adventure, I should say.

Treasa Edmond: 3:20

And they have you as a role model. That's great. So let's talk about your business first. So how did you get started as a freelancer? Did you come from brick and mortar business or a full-time job?

Amy Ragland: 3:31

So I really say I've had like three careers in my life and my first career was in corporate communications and I worked for several different types of industries, but I was really the person who wrote everything for those companies that I worked with. So that was about 10 years. And then I took a little bit of a break and I had my girls and I ended up transitioning, after about three years of being home, into working in financial services. So that's where I've come from. I worked in financial services for about 10 years and in 2017, I decided to take what had been a very, very part-time side hustle of freelance writing, because through the years, I picked up clients here and there and I dabbled and I'd written for some content mills just to make a little grocery money, to feel like I was bringing in additional funds for the house. And in 2017, I found myself I wasn't totally happy where I was, just for various reasons. I loved the people I worked with, I didn't love the work I was doing and at the time, my girls were nine and seven and I was cleaning out a closet.

Amy Ragland: 4:37

One day and I found a business plan I had written in grad school. It was for an entrepreneurship class I was taking in grad school in 2001 I think, and it was a company I was going to start. That was basically a creative agency and it was me writing all the copy and working with companies to produce their collateral. And in 2001, when I wrote it, it was a whole different landscape. Everything was print, everything was. The internet was still kind of in its infancy, which makes me sound like a total dinosaur, but I went through it and I thought you know what this has legs. It really sparked something in me of what if I go back and try this now.

Amy Ragland: 5:19

I'm in a place now where we have a primary income, my husband's providing primary income, so I have that stability. I'm very grateful for that. I'm fortunate to have that he has insurance. This is a good time for me to try to take this leap and, with my girls being the ages that they were, freelancing offered flexibility that nothing else offered, and it offered me the chance to try out my entrepreneurial legs a little bit and see if I actually had the chops to run the business. So that's how I got started full time. I've been doing it six and a half years full time now and every year has been a little bit better than the last. So I've just been refining my processes over the past few years and really figuring out who it is I want to work with and who I want to be as a writer.

Treasa Edmond: 6:04

Did you have any major growing pains when you first started working with clients? Just all the time.

Amy Ragland: 6:09

I think I. It's funny because, coming from I had worked in financial services for almost eight or nine years, or for eight or nine years and you would think that would be my automatic niche that I would jump into and want to go after and I didn't. When I first started freelancing I thought I needed to be everything for everybody in order to get clients. That turning down a company coming to me to do the writing was silly because I was trying to build a business. For the first two years I really tried to be a generalist and I was working for everything from a financial services firm to an ethanol technologies manufacturing company. There were different things in between there and I just wasn't getting a lot of traction. I wasn't getting a lot of growth and I resisted knitting down for a long time just because I thought that I had to offer it to everybody. But once I accepted that and got over myself and decided, okay, I'm going to pursue financial services, that's when I really saw growth and improvement in my business.

Treasa Edmond: 7:11

Yeah. Yeah, I have the problems too if I want to work with all of the people because I like all of the things. So it's not shiny object syndrome, I get board easy syndrome, and that's me too, yeah. So I've always had a problem with that, and it wasn't bad because I did ghost writing so I could write for all kinds of different people and it made sense. But switching to strategy, that meant I had to become more focused and that was hard for me, absolutely yeah. So let's talk about some of the challenges you faced, or still face, in managing multiple clients simultaneously. Now, do you work for individual clients primarily, or do you go through agencies? I know a lot of people who work with big corporations use agency work.

Amy Ragland: 7:53

I do both and I prefer agencies simply because at the end of the year I don't want to get $110, $199. I don't want to be one service provider to many clients. I want to be one service provider to providers who have many clients or who have many projects. So I purposely seek out companies and clients who have the potential for recurring work a lot of it, and that is. I try to keep my client list very small, simply because I would rather manage four personalities than 20 at the same time, and so I think that has really helped me juggle multiple clients, simply because it allows me to get a little bit more in depth with knowing their businesses, understanding how they operate, understanding their messaging. I have one client that I have pretty much written all of their messaging for the past six years and they just give me stuff and say here, go, because we're at that level of they just know I know what they're trying to convey. So that's been fantastic in terms of really learning their businesses and really I think keeping my client list smaller has enabled me to better juggle.

Amy Ragland: 9:06

Now I will say sometimes, especially when they're new, they don't always understand that hey, I have other clients to do and I have other work to do. So I think that goes back to you have to set boundaries from early in the relationship of. These are the expectations for turnaround times and these are the expectations for what I need from you to do my job, and I'm willing to be flexible. I'm always willing to say, hey, yeah, I've got time in my schedule to turn this around for you, even overnight if you need me to, or 24 hours or whatever. But I think when I set those expectations early it does help them understand they are not my only priority. They are a high priority, but they're not my only priority.

Treasa Edmond: 9:47

Yeah, I do that very carefully with language I talk about when I'm working with my clients and I put the plural and and I make that about. It's just part of my language for my very first thing. So when you get one of those clients who does want you to drop everything or Expects you to do an overnight project, I charge rush fees for overnight projects unless they're on retainer and it's an exception. So I will make an exception. I will help you this one time. In the future. Any work that has less than Three days lead time, I will charge an additional rush fee. But how do you handle that?

Amy Ragland: 10:25

I don't charge rush fees and I know a lot of freelancers do, and I think it's a great idea For me. I think Jennifer go forth Gregory has talked a lot about it on her blog and on her Facebook page about how she's also a short deadline person. She likes those short deadlines. I try to say yes whenever I can and whenever it works for me.

Amy Ragland: 10:46

If it's just me dropping everything to accommodate and I'm stressed out, no that doesn't work, but if I have the availability and I can make it happen, I'd like to say yes whenever I can. That way, when I say no, they actually know I'm not just not wanting to work or not wanting to help them. It gives me a little bit of wiggle room to be able to say no when I need to so if I say yes, as much as I can, I can say no later.

Treasa Edmond: 11:10

It's that good karma factor. And now for everyone listening to this, let's clarify that this is going to be different for whatever type of freelance business you have. Designers need longer lead times. Photographers they can't drop everything and go somewhere in an hour usually and set up a major photo shoot, so Make sure that your boundaries Reflect your need to get things done so that doesn't cause you undue stress, because that's the whole point. Absolutely so, amy, as your business grew, did you find that you needed to implement systems or tools to streamline your processes, or did you do that right out the gate because of your experience?

Amy Ragland: 11:52

You know I did that right out of the gate. I originally started off using as far as tools go. I use Trello to track all my projects and.

Amy Ragland: 12:00

I'm a big believer that even if you're not working hourly, you should still track your time, especially if you're new, especially if you are not sure how long a new, new type of project will take. It really just gives you a better idea of how much time you're gonna spend on a project and it'll help you quote there. So I use Trello with like a plug-in or a power-up I think is what they call it to help track my time. This year I switched over to click up, which is I've kind of got it set up to a similar situation. So it looks like Trello, it's got the cards and everything and I have it on a weekly view to where I can see everything that I need to do this week at a glance. And that helps me because I have a lot of recurring projects, things that happen monthly or quarterly, that I need to be sure to leave space for. So if a client comes to me with a new project and they're hey, can you do this on such and such a day, I can just look and go okay, I've got a little bit of space this day, so that has really helped me keep track of things and really I Tag every.

Amy Ragland: 13:01

I give every project a tag of what kind of project it is, whether it's writing or I do some editing or If it's revisions. Like that helps me see how many projects have I had to go back and do revisions on. And then I also Tag it with type of project. So if it's a blog post or if it's a white paper or if it's a website. I'm kind of a numbers nerd, I'm the data nerd. So I like to go back at the end of the year and say, oh, I worked on X number of blog posts and X number of websites or whatever, and and just dig into the numbers and see what I did over the past year. So those have been really helpful for me, and just making sure nothing falls through the cracks, and then I'm staying on top of my work.

Treasa Edmond: 13:37

I I love that. I've never thought about going back and counting how many projects I've worked on. I count the dollars because you have to. Yeah, I love that. And when I first started out, I learned really quickly that, even though I was not charging my clients hourly, I needed to know how long something was going to take because I was underbidding and selling myself short constantly. So yeah, for those first six months to a year, track your time internally, charge them the project rate or however you charge, but make sure that you know how long it's going to take.

Amy Ragland: 14:12

Absolutely. I also have an Excel spreadsheet I set up a long time ago. I set it up from the very beginning to where I track all of my income and I track it by client and I track it by month and quarter and then I compare it to the previous year in my spreadsheet. I haven't set all up to calculate automatically, so I can tell you at any given moment what I've made for the month, how close I am to my goals for the month and for the year and for the quarter, and that has really been helpful because it just it lets me see how I've grown year over year and it also lets me see if I need to have more butt in chair time, because that's really what's producing the money is me sitting down at my desk. If I haven't been hitting my goals, it's usually because I've been doing something else.

Amy Ragland: 14:57

I've been distracted by something else.

Treasa Edmond: 14:59

Which is a hazard for freelance people.

Amy Ragland: 15:01

It is, but if I see it in black and white, then I can say oh yeah, that's why I'm down this month. This is, I haven't been at my desk.

Treasa Edmond: 15:08

Before we move on, you've mentioned a couple of things. I'd like to touch on One. You were inspired to start your freelance business because you found a business plan you had done, and I know of very few freelancers who, when they start out, they start with a business plan, and I think that's brilliant and I think anyone who hasn't done it up to this point should set down and do the exercise, because it helps clarify so much on your business. How much of that business plan did you change or have you changed up to this point?

Amy Ragland: 15:39

Yeah, when I originally did it, I envisioned myself running more of an agency kind of format and I have come to the conclusion. I've toyed with that idea through the years of switching from a freelancer model to more of an agency, more of a writing agency model, and I just don't know that's the right direction I want to go. So I did change up a lot of it. But a couple of years ago I actually put together it's a business planning guide for freelancers, coaches and consultants and it was based on something I was doing for myself. So every November, december, I was sitting down and I was looking over the past 12 months and then I was looking at the next 12 months and it was really a look at what marketing did I do, what marketing methods worked, what were my revenue goals? Did I hit them? Did I not? Why didn't I, if I didn't?

Amy Ragland: 16:26

That retrospective thing and then setting some goals for myself for the coming year, setting some not the nitty gritty tactics of my marketing, but who do I want to reach out to? Who do I want to work with this year? Do I want to pivot my services and offerings? So I tend to. I think I learned this from Melanie Padgett-Powers. She does, I think, a quarterly business review where she really sits down and looks at her business from top to bottom, and so I implemented that a couple of years ago and I put together this guide for myself and just work through it every year and really just try to build a plan that's loose enough to be adaptable and flexible, as I need it to be. I mean, we all discovered that in 2020. We all had big plans for 2020. And then look what happens. It needs to be flexible, but it also sets some concrete things for me to work towards.

Treasa Edmond: 17:13

And I love that you don't just do the planning and the goals. You actually look at how you're doing as you go along, so that you can pivot. I think that's important. I think that setting goals is vital and too few people do that. But you can't just set the goal and then do the thing and then set another goal the next year. You have to actually monitor where you are, how you're doing, and especially with marketing, we think we're doing all of the things, but if we sit down and look at what we're doing, we're either dropping the ball here or we're not doing this, or maybe we hit it really hard for two weeks so we felt like we were doing a great thing, but then we haven't actually touched it in three months, but it feels like we have been. That kind of thing is interesting and I think a lot of us get really busy. We focus on the client work, because the client work is where the money comes from. We forget to focus on our business, and I think that's necessary. I'm really happy that you do that.

Amy Ragland: 18:10

I think too.

Amy Ragland: 18:10

I think having a business plan gives me the opportunity to look ahead to the next year and think what big changes in my life are coming up, because when I started this business, my kids were nine and seven and very much in the thick of high maintenance.

Amy Ragland: 18:25

They need me to drive them everywhere and to do everything and facilitate their lives basically.

Amy Ragland: 18:30

And now they're 16 and 14 and my oldest just started driving and so my life has changed a lot since she's started driving herself and her sister around a lot, because I have suddenly this big block of time in my day that I didn't have before, because I sat down at the beginning of the year and I looked at the year coming up and thought, okay, I'm going to have some room here to maybe add some new clients or add some new services or do something a little bit different with my business. It really got me thinking ahead of that. So I was ready when they went back to school in August and I suddenly thought what am I going to do with all this additional time I have in my day that I used to spend dropping off and picking up and waiting and all of that? So I think it helps us, too, when we realize that, hey, maybe I need to pivot or maybe my business is in a season of shift and flux. It really helps you think ahead, do you think?

Treasa Edmond: 19:26

from just your viewpoint, that having that plan that is flexible, that can shift and pivot, does that make it easier for you to deal with the uncertainties? And that comes with making a business change, because I know a lot of us will do the thing and we stay in that same groove, because it's so much easier and less scary than stepping out and adding a new service or trying a new thing or going into a new niche.

Amy Ragland: 19:54

I think it does. I think a lot of that is based on personality, though. I like trying new things and I like going out on a limb and doing something different. I don't like it when it fails.

Amy Ragland: 20:06

But I feel like that's a learning experience, and I don't think everybody is as comfortable with adapting and pivoting on a dime, because I'm more like I think through the years I have learned that usually, if something changes, it usually leads to something better. And it may be painful in the moment, but it usually leads to something better for me, for my family, and that's really what freelancing is all about.

Treasa Edmond: 20:33

Yeah, yeah it is and we need to focus on that. Next question setting expectations. We've talked about this throughout the week, when we were talking about setting boundaries, and you've mentioned it today. I know most of us know that setting expectations is crucial in a client relationship. We can't promise the moon and then deliver a molehill. You can't do it. So how do you make sure your clients have a clear understanding of project scope, timelines and deliverables?

Amy Ragland: 21:04

So a lot of times my clients will come to me. I run the gamut of clients that come to me and some will say I have this idea for a project, go. And some of them will come to me with maybe they've written out a first draft and they say you just polish this for me and take it to final form, and then everything in between. So what I like to do is I like I don't do a scope of work for every project simply because I would be spending half my time doing that. What I do is I send them back an email and I say, okay, here's what I'm envisioning the final product to look like, here's when I think I can have it to you, and if they don't have a deadline in mind already, and are there any other questions or anything else that I need to know from you in order to successfully complete this? It's as easy as that and as hard as that, right, and I just really try to spill everything out on email and then that way I can go back and reference it and I can also cover myself in case I need to later.

Amy Ragland: 22:01

The biggest thing for me is to have a timeline and to have a deadline, because I know myself and I know my working style and I know I have to have a hard deadline or else I will never do it. It's that whole idea of I respond to text messages either immediately or never, like there's no in between. So I really need a hard deadline, even if it's me saying to the client hey, I will have this to you on such and such a date, and then I put it on my calendar Because if it's on my calendar and it exists, it will happen. So that's the biggest thing for me is making sure I have a timeline.

Treasa Edmond: 22:35

And I think this is one of the benefits of working with a few select clients that you have a long term relationship with is you can just send an email and clarify it, because you did all of the hard work when you first started. Are there any clients? Or, if you start working with a new client, are you more structured in that? Do you do a little bit more? This is the way that it's going to be.

Amy Ragland: 22:57

You know what? No, I'm not. I'm pretty go with. I'm probably an oddball in terms of I tend to to adapt a few of my processes to how they want to work. I think it goes back to that whole be easy to work with kind of thing, but don't be a pushover. So a lot of times where I can, I try to adapt to whatever they need and I don't set up strict. This is how it's going to be approach. I don't know if that's a great answer to the question. I don't always just run with whatever they ask, but as much as I can I try to.

Treasa Edmond: 23:34

Yeah, and this is another one of those that a lot of people do it a lot of different ways and you find what works best for you. There are some fields like photography. You have a contract, design work. You need really clear deliverables and project scope and timelines. And when they need to get you things because there's so much back and forth my ghost writing. I have a hard timeline that we follow as we go along and they have a timeline to. It's not just me, so it's very much back and forth. And then with strategy, of course, I have a full on contract for that, because it's usually with bigger organizations and we have a lot of moving pieces and that contract is just a very clear.

Treasa Edmond: 24:17

I could do it as a really souped up statement of work, but it's the same thing. I have all of those expectations laid out for everyone. 100 ways to do this. Find the way that works best for you, but do set expectations, even if it's just in an email, because you do need to cover yourself. This is a business. The handshake agreement doesn't work in today's world.

Amy Ragland: 24:37

Absolutely, and I think a lot of times too. I think it depends on what type of client you're working with. If I'm working with a solo financial advisor, my processes are going to be a little bit different than when I'm working with a thousand employee RIA or something like that, or investment. I tend to try to have two or three types of processes that I follow, based on what type of client it is.

Treasa Edmond: 25:00

Yeah, so lots of things to consider with that, but Amy has some great insights. All right, so we've talked about dealing with difficult clients and both of us are at that stage in our career where we pretty much winged away. We're from difficult clients, we just don't, we just don't. But we all have challenging questions we have to answer every once in a while from a client. What are some of the challenging questions you've gotten, or maybe even just one really challenging question?

Amy Ragland: 25:26

One thing that popped up not very long ago was clients that want me to really. They really want me to be an employee. Right, that's a hard one because you want to set boundaries and you want to. I am a very independent spirit. I want to be clear from the beginning with clients that I am not your employee. I'm not at your back and call. I will do my best to accommodate short term stuff and to accommodate your projects as needed, but I am not your employee. I don't work for you, I'm not, and so I think that's the most challenging thing that I have come across is defining my role as a freelancer or as an independent contractor, and a lot of times, like you said earlier, is all in the language of I'm not working for you, I'm working with you, I am, I'm a provider for you, and I think sometimes it's easy to fall into that. Employer employee language is I'm looking for people hiring for a job, or I see a lot of freelancers talk in employment language and we really need to talk in freelance language.

Treasa Edmond: 26:29

So we don't have we don't have employers.

Amy Ragland: 26:31

We have clients we're not hired by, we have working agreements and things like that. So I think that is a big challenge. Sometimes it just comes down to educating the client on what your role is.

Treasa Edmond: 26:43

Yeah, I use the terms partner with or work with a lot. I never say I work for them and I do mention I keep them as clients. I keep all of that language very specific and it becomes second nature. If you do it, it becomes second nature.

Amy Ragland: 26:59

Absolutely.

Treasa Edmond: 27:00

So let's talk about some of the things that you find most fulfilling about freelancing, that independence and stuff like that.

Amy Ragland: 27:09

Yeah, I think the independence for me. I've always been drawn to more of an entrepreneurial kind of approach. All the a lot of the businesses I work for have been small business one person offices, and so there's that I think the flexibility for me has been the biggest benefit of freelancing. Just, you know, being able to. I have a husband has a very inflexible job, and so for me it's allowed me to be the primary person for my kids when all their various needs during the day, but still build something that is providing my family with financial stability. That has been very fulfilling to me to be able to juggle those two things. And so I think for me I think that the independence for me it's the most fulfilling experience that I've ever had.

Amy Ragland: 27:55

The next step is I really enjoy giving back to other freelance researchers, especially other women who are wanting the same thing. It is so hard to manage a house, manage a family, manage and still want to work, and many women still do want that career fulfillment, but working for somebody else is just not balancing, and so I do a lot of helping provide insights and advice through Facebook groups and things like that. I don't coach, I don't do any of that, but I really love talking to other freelancers, especially those who are getting started in their business, trying to figure all of this out and pursue not only freelance writing but maybe figuring out what path is right for them as an independent business owner. So that's really. I find that interesting, I find that fulfilling, I love doing that.

Treasa Edmond: 28:47

So in the giving back you're starting a new newsletter.

Amy Ragland: 28:51

I am. It's called how I Freelance and it's really a first person looking. There's a hundred million ways to freelance, right, you could be a writer or a designer or a web developer, or I have a friend who she's a freelance accountant. She's a fractional CFO for companies and it's really a freelance, it's a consultant position. I just the how I Freelance is going to highlight all of the different ways people run their business of one and right now, if we're in the subscription phase so people want to sign up, it'll be at HowIFreelancecom and it's just going to be a weekly newsletter that comes out highlighting a different freelancer. So how do?

Treasa Edmond: 29:30

you count. We'll make sure that link is in the show notes and you're also, probably, about the time this comes out, going to be offering your planning guide that you mentioned.

Amy Ragland: 29:42

I am. We talked about that a little bit earlier, and it's something that I think everybody could benefit from looking back and looking forward every year, and even every quarter too. Where have I been, how have I been doing and where am I going? And so that guide is a freelancers. It's the planning guide for freelancers, coaches and consultants, and it is going to be available probably about the time this comes out. So look for that too.

Treasa Edmond: 30:06

We'll make sure the link to that is also in the show notes. Okay, one final question, amy. Okay, what advice would you give to service providers looking to create lasting, successful partnerships with their clients?

Amy Ragland: 30:19

I think for me, the key has been to always listen and always be thinking about what can I do to make my clients life easier. And sometimes that means I'll reach out and I'll say hey, I was working on this white paper and I came up with a couple of different ideas for how you could repurpose it into blog posts. You want to talk about it? Or I will say, I went ahead and put together a couple of social media posts for you just as an add-on to the service. Now, you don't want to do that too much because you don't want that scope creep to light. But if you can offer that additional value and kind of surprise them with that from time to time, clients really like that, and so I think there's that.

Amy Ragland: 31:05

I think also it goes back to what I was saying earlier about being easy to work with. Boundaries are fantastic, but if you're putting a lot of effort into your work, you're going to be sick. But if you're putting up too many boundaries to working with you, then people are busy, clients are busy, they want to know that you're going to take their projects and, like you said earlier, they're going to just trust you to do it, and I think, the more that you can demonstrate that you're trustworthy. That's going to help.

Treasa Edmond: 31:31

That's going to go a long way towards building a list. Yep, that's so true. Thank you so much for being with us this week, Amy. We really appreciate it Absolutely All of your insights. Thank you so much. Come back next week.