How to Move from Full-Time to Freelance Writing
Have you thought about making the jump from your 9-to-5 to freelance writing? Not sure how to do it, what you need in place, or what that means for your career?
We're talking about how to make the leap, what you need in place, how to jumpstart your business, and when it's time to leave the 9-to-5 lifestyle.
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Hey, welcome in. So today we're going to talk about how to move from your nine to five job to freelance writing. I get this question a lot from people who are trying to make enough money to quit their full-time job, and then actually have a freelance writing business and write about the things they want to, instead of doing repetitive projects over and over again for basically the same employer and get bored with it. So we're going to walk through a little bit of how to kind of make that move, what you kind of need in place. Some things that you need to think about for your career, and then when it might be time to actually leave your nine to five and kind of make that leap. So, firstly, I want to do is give you guys a quick update because they're so cute today.
So quick pup date berries looking up at the trees. We have a thing of priests right here. Let's see if I can give it to him. Oh, there he goes. They're both interested. Here we go. There you go. Treat out for you all. Now. We're real interested or real interested in any treat out for you. Good girl. All right. So now we have our quick pup date and we're going to get back to action. Maybe we'll go back to them a little bit because they will give us some tree dos. Good girl. Good job, buddy. Sorry. I touched your nose. I need you to like that. Okay. Back to the thing, this is going to be a little fun. So I personally Hey Vicky, welcome in. There's just, I'm going to add her in just say hi, let's see if she pops in there and he goes, hi Vicky.
Welcome in. So I'm going to move this to do. Okay, cool. There we go. All right. So what we're going to be talking about is the nine to five thing. So a lot of times what happens is that we have our security put in with our job, right? So a lot of times what happens is we are very happy living in the security of our full-time job. We feel like having that paycheck really gives us something to hold onto. Oh, well, it's kind of guaranteed. It's coming every two weeks. I know, kind of the payment schedule with that, you know, it's, it's something where you feel like you have benefits and you have coworkers and there's a lot of different pieces to a nine to five that people really like to have. Right. So what we got to think here is we need to move that feeling of security and understand it's not as secure as it actually seems.
Right? So one of the things I think is the biggest pointer for moving from your nine to five to freelance writing is that your full-time job is not as secure as it seems. People get laid off, people lose their job because you know, they're downsizing. They get fired because of a variety of reasons, right? So a lot of times people think having a nine to five is very secure, but there's a statistic I read a long time ago that said the average American has five different careers during their lifetime. So that doesn't mean that you start as like a lowly coffee getter and you become an editor and then a senior editor and then editor and chief. That's not really what it means. It means they have five different, totally separate careers. Like they start out maybe as you know, a writer and then they decide maybe to do editing and then they're bored of that.
So they decide they're going to become an arborist and then like a gym person, like they inspect gems or they become an archeologist or something like that. So the study was really interesting and that they have five different careers over the course of their life. So to me, that kind of signals, like it's not only that your job isn't secure, right? When you lose your job, sometimes you think like, Oh, I need to start over. I need to get something out. But it also means that you have different ideas for what you want to do than just work for one employer for the rest of your life. I think a lot of people might get stuck. I think this is something that gets freelance writers or future freelance writers stuck sometimes is they think that the, that is a forever place that it's that old school mentality where you have that job until you retire, like, cool, I've got this job now.
You know, kind of what my parents did. Right. My parents my dad worked for the same company, essentially his whole career. Like he you know, he started college, he got drafted for Vietnam, went to do that, obviously not willing to do that, but anyway, so he did that came back, finished college, and then he got a job as an engineer and he did that until he retired same company. And it was like, you know, we're working, you know, we're doing a good job at our, our, you know, at our company, we're finishing our deadlines, whatever. But a lot of it is like, we're staying here until we retire. I don't really think that's the thing anymore. Especially with younger generations like millennials and gen Z. And I think a lot of people kind of under maybe even 50 or 45, I think it's a switch here.
So when you're thinking about moving into the nine to five, remember that that security piece is a nice secure, as you think people lose their jobs. People want to change careers. People want to move on. They want to do more with their life than just sit at the same desk every day for 40 years. Right? So that security that you're holding onto, you can also have that in freelance writing. It's more about learning what you need in place to actually feel more secure in your freelance writing business before you make the jump. So let's talk about that a little bit. So if you're going to jumpstart your business and start freelance writing, here's kind of what I did. I always wanted to be a freelance writer. And what I thought I would do is that I would write fiction books and then do freelance writing on the side.
And I might still write fiction books, but I just fell in love with freelance writing. So the way I got started was in 2013, I had a full-time job. It was my very first full-time job. And they called me in the office and they were like, Hey, we're having a bunch of layoffs. You're going to get laid off at the end of the month. And we're sorry. Bye. So that's kind of how it went. And I was like, well, what am I going to do? I guess I just need to start freelance writing. And like, I guess I'll just find some clients. And I got on Upwork, it was oDesk. Then I got on Upwork and I tried to do all these things. And I basically got the push that I needed to get started it at the time I cried a lot.
It was really hard and I didn't really understand the jump starting my business piece, but I, man, that push really helped me to get it together. So what ended up happening in an interesting turn of events is I got kept on. So I got kept on I worked part time through that month at the end of the month, they were like, Hey, we actually need you. We'll keep you on. And so I got kept on full-time, so I didn't actually get laid off, but for the next year and a half, I worked on growing my business, understanding the client stuff I worked on having, you know, a stable income coming in. And that was off of Upwork, which I don't recommend. I, I basically have done everything wrong if I freelance writing career. So we're going to go over the things you should do, right.
To actually make that jump. So I did have income coming in and in June, 2014. So the layout situation was in March, 2013 June, 2014. I quit my full-time job and I went, full-time freelance. I've been full-time freelance since then. And so yeah, so let's go over the jump-starting things. So what do you kind of need in place? I think one of the major things here is you need a basic understanding of how to market to your clients, all the other pieces, like the writing pieces and the running your business and the getting paid and all this stuff. It doesn't matter if you don't have clients who are willing to give you money to do the actual work. So the marketing piece is a lot of those LOI. So those letters of introduction that we learned how to right. We have we talked about those before in a previous video.
So you can hop back and watch that. But when you learn how to identify your high paying clients, when you learn to figure out how to write those LOI with like, you know, I have templates below. If you guys are interested to pick those up to their Los and marketing templates that I use in my business right now to get clients and they kind of speed up the process. But what we need to understand is the marketing piece is how we get people in the door to pay us so that we can leave our full-time job, those high paying clients, right? We're identifying them by, they make five to 50 million in revenue. This is a number I just kind of want to clarify this real quick. This is a number that I have picked up recently. I used to say like 1 million to like 25 million.
But with all the pandemic stuff, I've noticed that a lot of people need, it's just really chaotic for businesses under 5 million. And I think that stability of five to 50 million really helps you get a footing and have them have a footing. So it's not this like giant of things. So,ufive to 50 million, they have potential those high paying clients have potential to, they have the revenue to pay you. They're making content, they're moving forward with a bunch of different content types. They're doing something innovative in their industry. Uif you want more, something more in depth, I have something back in the high paying clients, video, a few videos back, but we need to learn that marketing piece. So we have people going in the door. Number two is we need to learn what types of writing our ideal clients are looking for.
So let's think about niche. So this is something that I feel a lot of people struggle with. I am a big fan of having a niche because I think it gives you direction. Sometimes I worry that freelance writers get stuck. I'm trying to market to everybody. And it, they, with that lack of direction, they really kind of spin their wheels. I think that that if working without a niche works really well if you're doing publications because really you're, you're like gold star effort. There is the idea. If you can come up with a ton of different ideas, send those to publications. I don't think having a niche there is as critical as working for businesses, where they want someone who basically has a specialty. So think about your intersection of what you've done, what you're excited to write about and what industries have money.
So there's industries that always have money. Those are, you know, finance, health, hair, anything tech there's a bunch of the boring stuff too. That's like super technical, like well, it's boring to me I guess, but there's a lot of different niches that always have money. They're always kind of like big places where you could always make money. But for me, I work in food, travel, real estate, insurance and health. So I don't really do healthcare. I interweave my health in amongst my other stuff. So for me that meant finding businesses who are making that content also had the revenue and then also needed a writer to basically create all this content. But they were all moving in the right direction. They had all the signals and all the potential for me to kind of work with them. So that was number two.
The next thing you kind of need in place is just a general understanding of how a freelance business is run. So we don't need to create an LLC. So I know that a lot of people get really tripped up about this. I had a coaching client the other day who got very tripped up about this, and I just kind of want to relieve a little bit of the tension like I did for her, where we don't need to have an LLC to be taken seriously. I worked under like, I didn't have an LLC until last year. So I regret that. I wish I had formed it sooner, but if you want to get started and you're hate that nine to five, you want to leave, you don't have to set up a business. You don't have to get an EIN. You can just fill out your w nine with your social security number and move on.
And then as you kind of get set up, then you can set up your LLC as I always recommend using your name for your LLC because it, then you can change to whatever you want, but the backend is always your name. So when you have that backend as your name, that's basically to being used for a lot of people, not a lot, but I think there's this misconception sometimes that your LLC needs to be the way that you talk about your brand. And as a writer, your brand is you, your byline is your name. There's a lot of pieces that signal to your name. So saying that your LLC is like creative pens, LLC. And we do copy for you. That feels a little dated and old to me and, and not really true, right? W it's not a week, it's a year. You are doing the writing.
It's your byline. You're the one working with the client. Even if you had a VA or someone working with you, it's really not a week. You don't need to pretend like you're a company. You're just a person. And a lot of people really like hiring person to person. So don't get stressed out about the LLC. We can work on it later. Like, you know, once you're kind of in the groove, you can set it up. You for example, like my accountant told me I didn't need an LLC until I made 40 to 50 K. So you, you don't need it to get to jump off your nine to five. So don't worry so much about that. Don't stress. The next thing is, how do we get paid? I get asked this a lot. How do freelance writers get paid? How do they end up getting money in their accounts?
What do we actually do? So let's, this is like a basic thing, but it's like PayPal, Stripe check a wire transfer. So we're, if you have an international client, I like transfer wise, but I like Stripe. I use Stripe. I get checks obviously from publications. And then I also have direct deposit. Like I have direct deposit from those few clients. I don't think I've ever gotten a wired. Oh, I have gotten a wire transfer. Yeah. and then if I had an international client I did I'm from Canada, but they paid me by check. So transfer wise is always good for international stuff, but Stripe, I'm a big fan of Stripe for payments because they have a bonus PayPal doesn't. So Stripe gives you a very little fee if they pay by bank account. So if your client comes in and they pay by credit card, Stripe and PayPal are the same.
But if your client comes in and they pay by bank account, Stripe is super, super cheap on the fee from basically bank account to bank account. So that's something you can't get with PayPal, which is why I stopped using it. I want to always give my clients the option to pay by bank account if they want to. And that saves me on fees and it's a lot easier and quicker. So I like Stripe. ACH is great too. If you work for a bigger company, let's say you end up getting a client who they typically pay contractors. Like, they're like, Hey, give us your w nine and like, fill out this, you know, bank form. Cool. Like ACH is always great because there's no fees. You just get it in your bank accounts a lot quicker check is what a lot of publications do. Now.
They're kind of switching to ACH because they're not in the office as much, which is like, Hey, there's a lot faster. So that's really cool. But those are kind of the ways we get paid. Don't get stopped up on how to get paid as a freelance writer. What we really need to do is that first piece, who are we marketing to? How do we get clients? Then we have a discussion with our clients of like, okay, cool. How do I, like, how do I get my upfront payment from you? That'll be our next thing. So how do I get my upfront payment from you? And if you like below, I have a bundle of things that also have a contract in it that talks about payment terms. But basically what we're going to have in our contract is that they can pay by Stripe, ACH company check or wire transfer that will be in your contract.
So if you send that to them that'll work. You can also have a conversation with them of what the upfront payment means. Sometimes they're like, yeah, send your contract. We'll pay you that way. Sometimes they have their own company process and then you have to go through that way. So it depends on it, but it's always a conversation. Don't stress out. It's going to be okay. Remember, I think, you know, people forget that there are people on the other end, you're just talking to another person. They don't have power over you. They're not some sort of magical being that can wave their wand and like give you your freelance writing business. That's not really how it works. It's just another human that you're having a conversation with who happens to work at a company and you happen to be a freelance writer. That's it.
You guys are partners in this. So if you ask a question about payment, if you ask about how their contracts work, if you ask about any other things, you know, indemnification, yada, yada, they should be a partner with you and be able to talk it through with you. So don't stress. So our next little piece here, what we need in place is our upfront payment policy. So I always take 50% upfront because it's really good to know that they can actually pay you. Cause sometimes when you don't get upfront payments, people skip out on payments. Like you do all this work and send an invoice and then they never paid, which really sucks. So 50% upfront, make sure you at least get paid for some of the work if they skip out. But it also means that they can actually pay you because they're giving you a payment upfront.
So I always had that in my contract and I explained that on my client meeting, Hey, just want to let you know, the way I work is I do 50% upfront, 50% on delivery. And if I'm going to do a retainer with them, I do 50% of the first month upfront and 50% of that first month at the end. And then every following month of our retainer, I send an invoice on the first and it's do net 14. So those types of, of payment ways that we go about it are really important because it makes sure that we get paid. A lot of times, freelance writers come to me and there are like, I'm on the den. I'm one of the moderators on a freelance writers den. And they're like, Oh my gosh, my client isn't paying my invoice. They're not returning my calls. What do I do?
And that 50% upfront payment you could say, well, at least I got 50% upfront. So the lease there's that. And there's a lot of times where you asked for 50% upfront and it turns out that they just never pay it. They just never get back to you. And then that saves you a lot of hassle down the road. So that's another thing. I'm just going to reiterate one more thing before we move to next point. So what do we need to jumpstart or is just understand that you're working human to human. I know that this was a hard thing for me because I didn't really realize that I always felt like someone else was giving me work. I always felt like I had to work for it. And then they would give work to me. That's not really how it works. We should be in partnership to solve each other's goals, right?
We're helping them create content that content is giving them business. It's giving them sales. It's giving them a lot of things that they want. So we are in partnership. And anytime you get in a situation where you feel like they have power, or they are doing weird stuff, maybe that's a red flag that you guys aren't a fit or they're shady calling it. Or maybe that, you know, it's just not going to work out. But remember that it's human to human. Always be kind to someone, even if you guys are having a conflict, be nice, be kind, it's a human. If you get on the other side with someone and they're just not working with you, then I would just cut bait and leave because it's just, it's just not working. Like why are we going to sit here and do this work together when it's not working?
It's just stressful for everybody. So that's another thing. All right. So we're gonna move on to the next point. Cause I'm kind of running a little bit long. I'm not leaving as much time for questions, but this is really important. So when you're moving from full time to freelance, what it means for your career, right? What does that mean? Well, your career is going to be that you're moving into being a writer. Maybe you're not a copywriter at X company. Maybe it means that you're not head of so-and-so at this place, but being a freelance writer, I think is a really special thing. So the difference here is that we now are small business owners. We're making the move from being X person with X title on some of these things, right? We're moving from that to a place where we own a small business.
We pay different types of taxes. We have to hopefully like I use profit first and then we have a profit. So hopefully every business is profitable. But it means that your career is switching from person at this company to small business owner. This is a very big mindset shift. That was really hard for me to make. But I'm hoping that this advice will help you make the shift a little bit easier. So as a small business owner, one of the things that changed my mind a lot was instead of saying, Oh, I'm a freelance writer. I said, I own a freelance writing business. And I took this from Jennifer Goforth, Gregory. If you start saying, I own a freelance writing business, that means a lot like that changes the way you stand. It's stays just the way, how you speak to people that changes your mindset of how you think about your business rather than saying, Oh, I'm just a freelance writer.
Oh yeah. I'm just a writer. It gets you in that trap of like clients that are like, no, no, no. Like we don't need help. We just need someone to write it, which is like a big red flag. Like we just need someone to write it. Well, that's not really what it means. And that's not really what we're doing. We're offering a lot of things. It's not just writing it. Like if someone needed to just write it, they would've done it themselves. Right. There's a skill. There's a lot of experience. There's a lot of pieces here that make a difference. So small business owner, I own a freelance writing business. Remember those? Okay. One last thing before we jump to questions, I see Vicki's going hot in the chat and I'm going to get to those. So when is it time to leave your nine to five?
So I'll tell you a little bit about how I left mine. I, we were in the middle of a project and my work was kind of winding down for that particular project. My work was ramping up for freelance writing and it just was the time where I had already kind of was thinking about leaving soon. And it just kind of timed out that I, it was time for me to leave. I went in and I quit. And then instead I said, Hey, I'm giving my two weeks notice. And it turns out he was like my boss at the time was like, well, you know, would you be able to leave by Friday? And I was like, yeah, sure. Okay. but since let, let's back up a little bit, I forgot something. So that was in June, 2014 where I quit. But in February, 2014 was when I went to my boss and I was like, Hey, I'm not really working that much.
Can I work part time? And then, you know, still help with a project for work part-time. And by working part-time at least 20 hours a week, I still have health insurance. I still had income coming in. I was saving the business money, but I was still getting my work done. So that really helped a lot that February to June timeframe, where I worked part time. And then I came into the office, I think three days a week. And then I worked at home on my feet and stuff two days a week. So when I went in to quit my job, I was just like, you know what? My freelance stuff is ramping up. I'm just gonna, I gotta, I gotta leave. So I left, but for me, a lot of it was like, I already knew that I was building this business. I just needed it to get to a certain point before I could quit.
So what does that mean? It meant that I was making, I think at that time I was making $3,000 a month. So I was making $3,000 a month on my Upwork stuff. And I had enough saved up. I had about $20,000 saved. And then I also had the $3,000 a month coming in from upward. And for me, when, when is it time to leave your nine five? I like six months of savings in saved up to leave. Because sometimes even if you have your freelance writing business going, sometimes thing, your clients quit, or you have COVID or something crazy happens and you need to kind of pit it or figure out what to do. And having that six month barrier is really, really helpful to balance anything that's going wrong with your freelance writing business. So I like six months of savings and I also like already having established money coming in.
So if you can't do that and you're just wanting to make the jump, you hate your F your job. I think you should at least save like six to 12 months of money. That means like all your expenses and all your extras. So six to 12 months of expenses, plus add in there that you have you know, business expenses. Maybe you need to buy some software. Like you need to get harvest for invoicing or dub Sato, or you need to pay PayPal fees or whatever it is. And you're actually getting it less money because of the fees. So you need to make sure you have enough money saved up that you can make it if like a client drops off and you're having trouble finding another one. So when you leave your nine to five, I hope that you create a safety net. You know, sometimes the safety net is, is your 401k.
Sometimes that means like, you're just like, I'm out, I'm done. I can't do this. Like I'm out. Sometimes that savings is your 401k. Not ideal, not ideal. I still really think the six to 12 months of, of savings, or at least six months of savings is where you want to go. But if you just can't take it anymore and you just want to go, if you're going to go hard into freelance writing, and you're just going to do as many things as you can, then maybe the, maybe that's the right choice for you. I think that there's, sometimes we have to make our own choices, regardless of what experts or other freelance writers tell us to do. And sometimes that means leaving your job and using your 401k money to get it going. I've seen freelance writers do that. They've quit their job with no plan.
And in six months they're making enough income to pay their bills. So it depends on what you're doing and how your mind works and how much you hate your job and what you can do and where you live too. Right? If I lived in New York city, that would be a lot more expensive than living somewhere else. So there's a lot of different things to think about there. But when you leave your nine to five know that when you leave, it's not the end of anything you can, if things go wrong, you can always get a part-time job. Like you can always get a part-time job somewhere and make some extra money. You can always try to just like, go full force into your freelance writing business. You can always do a lot. Like, I don't think there's anything wrong. If you just feel like the freelance thing isn't working and you need to go back to a full-time job to save up money again, like sometimes that's what happens.
Sometimes that's a decision that you have to make. It doesn't mean you failed. It just means that you needed more time or you needed to learn maybe a few more tricks of the trade to, to kind of get those clients coming in and get it together in terms of the process or the writing, or making sure you get paid. So that's a lot of different things where we can make these decisions to leave our nine to five. So I'm going to wrap it up a little bit now, because I know I went a little over time. There's just, this is a topic I get really excited about. Cause I'm someone who left by nine to five for freelance writing. And it really changed my life. It changed the scope of like just how my career has gone. So I'm going to take a little bit of a break. I'm going to give you guys a pup date and then find some questions. So we're going to do a quick update and we'll maybe we'll give them some tree doughs. I bet when they're going to get real excited,
Let's even give him some credos. Usually the bad gets them. All right. Frito for bear. There you go, buddy. Credo for mini good girl.
All right. Let's get to questions. So let's look back through the chat. Do do, do do my note here. So Vicky says, let's have this pull up. So she says fear of the hiring party is evident that the J jobs was never more secure than freelancing. Yes. So this is so true. A lot of people think that day job is way more secure, right? But they can always hire and fire you whenever they want. You don't control the company. You don't control how your boss perceives you. You don't control how much funding they get or how much money they get from a project. There's a lot of things in there that really don't give you security at a nine to five job that people really think they will. So in that fearful attitude, I see she has another comment in here, which is talk about, yeah.
That fear too, of being in that, that like day job where you might lose your job, like having a freelance writing thing, let's say you just wanted to go part-time right. And you just want to do part-time freelancing. You can do that to make extra income, to provide a little more security, right? You don't necessarily have to leave your nine to five. And the that's the topic we're going over today. You don't have to leave, but you can always get a little bit more money by doing freelancing on the side. So I see that Tommy says also in a traditional full-time job, the insecurities are often hidden from you and you don't know about them until it's too late. So this is true. I think for a lot of times you don't really know what's really going on behind the scenes at the business. You don't know how much money is coming in. You don't know if the business is in the red or
In the black, you don't know how they're actually performing.
You don't know if they're thinking of layoffs until they announced that there's a lot of things here that make your job insecure. So let's see, we have another question from Tommy here. So it's pulling it up. Okay. If you don't recommend finding your first client on Upwork, is there another way you recommend? Yeah. So this goes back to my high paying clients video that I did a little bit ago. It's like a
Back in the archives, whatever
The YouTube. So yeah. So what we want to do is we got to pick our niche. So this is for business clients. If you're going after publications, I think you can kind of work on coming up with ideas, which means reading the publication, seeing the stories that they've done in the past and thinking of ideas to pitch them. So that would be your publications, your newsstand magazines, your consumer magazines, your trade magazines, those types of things. But I don't recommend upward because a lot of times, even if you set your hourly rate at a hundred dollars an hour, they're like, Hey, cool, can you do this in two hours? And then you're like, well, I guess so it's still the same thing. As you know, getting, not getting paid very well for your work. There are people. I do have to say that. So there are people on Upwork who makes six figures.
That's cool. That works for them. I just don't think if that pot form were to go away, they don't have work anymore. It just evaporates. It doesn't exist anymore. So if you build your own business, find your own clients and have your own processes, you, you have a business like going on Upwork and being like, who's wanting me today. I just don't think that's as useful. So for me, it's niche. So figure out where, who do you want to write for? Where does your experience coincide and who's making money? So like like we said, that could be finance. That could be SAS companies that could be startups. That could be tech companies that could be healthcare. I've written food, which hospitality, tech I've written real estate. So that's also a prop tech there's insurance. Insuretech is in there too, basically anything that you can add tech to, which is almost everything now like travel tech or food tech or agriculture, tech, ag tech FinTech, like, which is financial technology.
Like any, anything that you had tech to. A lot of times I have money. So find your clients, make sure they have that five to 50 million in revenue. You can check them at Crunchbase. You can check that on glass door. You can sometimes check it on LinkedIn. And then we want to start sending those Lys templates below, but they're also on my website. But those templates for those LOEs, you're going to start marketing to these clients and they have to have that potential. They need to have be creating that content. They need to basically be going in a direction. That means that they're, they're going to need you. And then once we start kind of like working with our upfront payment and getting paid by them, then we can start expanding our pool of clients. So I always like building your own business.
Oh Darren. Hi, Darren. I talked to Darren a lot via email. Okay, Derek. Sorry. this question might be worthy of its own session, but how do you regulate the workflow so that you don't fall into the feast or famine trap when you leave your day job? This is a great question. Darren always asks great questions. So here we go. This is its own video. And I I'm going to save this Darren to make its own video. So feast or famine, a lot of times has to do with your marketing. People don't seem to people, not people that writers sometimes seem to miss that the marketing piece is keeping the funnel, keeping the pipeline full of people. So when you're sending that marketing, you are sending it even when you're busy and when you're busy, maybe that looks like one LOI a week, or maybe it looks like five LOEs a month or 10 a month.
When you're, when you're like finishing projects and losing work. That means you've already been filling the pipeline while you've been busy, which means you continue to have client calls. You continue to have inbound. You continue to have those. Loes go out for you and put irons in the fire. So what we're doing here, when you leave your day job is that we need, that's why that marketing piece is your most important thing. When you're leaving your day job, learning how to do the marketing means that you consistently know how to put people in your pipeline so that you don't go through the famine part. You always have the feast part because the pipeline is always being filled. So I always knew that as irons in the fire, right? If my fire is blazing right now, I'm so busy with work. I'm not sleeping very much.
I'm working on the weekends. Like I still need to remember that this is only temporary, right? This is temporary, this fire blazing. So if I'm putting those irons in the fire, even if the fire blaze goes down a little bit, those other irons are getting heated up. That person that I sent that LOI to maybe six months down the road, they need help. And they come back to me because I kept following up that feast or famine cycle happens because you don't have those irons to follow up on you. Haven't been putting them consistently in the fire. So that marketing piece really matters when you're leaving that nine to five job. And it really matters the feast or famine trap, the famine trap happens because a lot of times people get sucked into the work and they're typing away and they're like, Oh my gosh, I have to get this done.
And they lose the focus on the future. They're losing their focus on six, excuse me, six months down the road. They're losing their focus on the future. Part of them that may be done with their projects. And then they're like, Oh crap, I didn't fill the pipeline. So I hope that was helpful. I mean, I am going to make a little bit of a video on that because that is a great topic. You always ask. Great, great questions, Darren. So I hope that was helpful for now. Doris says she likes the pup date cam. They are relaxed, but it's also because I have treatise. So they are in here right now. You know, being calm and being normal because they're locked in here in the room and we have treats. So we'll give them one more. Just we're a little bit over time. So all we heard the crinkly bag, the crinkly bag police.
Good girl. You guys see her a little buck teeth. She has these little buck teeth in the front there. You want to treat up? Sorry guys. [inaudible] There you go, buddy. Oh, yes. What tree? Those. Hey, come on. Okay.
So let's see any more questions before we hop off. Yay. Darren. Good. I'm glad that was helpful. Sometimes I think people get stuck in there that feast or famine thing is very common because you get sucked into the work. And then you're like, Oh my gosh, I have to do this work. And you forget about the filling the pipeline and doing the irons in the fire piece. Cool. Okay. So have you guys thought was this was helpful. Give me a like below, if you have questions, drop them in the comments. I will definitely answer them. And then if you guys feel like you want to keep up with me and keep up with all this freelance writing advice, feel free to subscribe. I super appreciate you guys being here. It was really fun. This is one of my favorite topics, so I'm glad we had the berries here. We Adam Charlotte still here because she's like, I would like more treats more treats Charlotte. You already had like 10. Okay. So I'm going to hop off. I hope to see you guys next week. New topic, new things to chat about. Maybe we'll do the feast or famine next week. I don't know yet. But it was great seeing you guys here really happy, really appreciate you guys showing up and talk to you soon. Bye for now.
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