What if you don’t feel confident about charging for your services? We always believe that you need to be compensated in some way, and while our first piece of advice will always be to clearly communicate an actual monetary price, there are other ways to be compensated for your work. In this minisode—live from Freshbooks headquarters in Toronto—we’re sharing how to confidently make money from your side hustle.
Emily Thompson 0:02
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Kathleen Shannon 1:05
Welcome to being boss. Today's minisode comes live from Toronto, when we hung out with over 100 bosses in person at freshbooks headquarters.
Charlene 1:21
My name is Charlene. I am a lawyer. And I started a food and philanthropy website. So because I earn a decent income, I can my fund my side hustle. But because it's a blog, what I'm learning about blogs, and maybe I've been misinformed, but everything is I think your pricing is determined on metrics, like how many views you have, how many followers you have. And because it's easy, because I can so easily slip back into Well, you know, this amount of my paycheck is funding it. I've been hesitant to ads and hesitant as and not charging. When companies and brands want to work with me, I do make money. Sorry. I do make money, you know, again, sporadically, usually through friends that hire me for recipe development and things like that. But right now, I'm not charging, because I feel like I'm not at that level where I can justify my charges. And I'm just wondering how I'm feeling
Kathleen Shannon 2:18
you know, it's the opposite, because you're like, I'm a badass lawyer. I don't need you. So you're gonna pay me double?
Emily Thompson 2:30
Yeah,
Kathleen Shannon 2:31
like why would you give it away for free whenever you don't even you don't need them. So my so you're working with sponsors and brands on your blog, right?
Charlene 2:40
Yeah, like so for example, I'm working with I got approached by this organization called restaurants for change. And they're having this dinner series, where all the money goes to Community Food center, Canada, and they want to talk about sustainable food systems. I'm going to another dinner and doing a post for World Vision where they're talking about addressing child hunger. So it's stuff like that, and that's what I'm passionate about. But I'm just doing these things. They're still Yeah, no, no, no, no, they have more money than I do, just to be clear. But yeah, I feel like I haven't like I'm trying to hit this like 5000 Twitter followers, which feels like it'll never happen. So I can say, and now you've got to pay me. You know, $50 I have contributors that are coming on to the blog. I'd love to give them something but I'm not making any money. So Oh, one shoe street high. One, number one, chew and chew your food stream. Okay, thank you.
Emily Thompson 3:39
So this is a massive mindset shift that needs to happen. I mean, like, I was just thinking, what if whatever freshbooks had called us like between episodes 10 and 15?
Kathleen Shannon 3:49
I don't know if we can talk about this.
Emily Thompson 3:51
Oh, no. I mean, between 10 and 15. Like, we've talked about how we're one of their smaller podcasts. And like Kathleen and I were not ready, like we were waiting on the numbers. We're like, we're gonna get a couple of good episodes out, and then we'll go after sponsors or whatever, whatever they called us. We'd be like, you know, what, we're actually not there yet. Like, let's just not right now.
Kathleen Shannon 4:10
And we have some of the lowest metrics, but, uh, who's hanging out at freshbooks headquarters right now.
Emily Thompson 4:18
Like, I mean, and I think you just are you trying to leave your full time job to make your side hustle, your main hustle,
Charlene 4:24
I love and enjoy my job. It's kind of related to what I took some of this social and philanthrophy issues that I talked about. So my plan was when I started a couple years ago to have as a habit as a side hustle for a set amount of time. And then when I was ready to leave my job kind of naturally, and I have a retirement plan in place, then I would continue doing it full time. So so 10 years as a side hustle, and then I would like to see it continue on into something. Yeah, unless
Emily Thompson 4:53
think about how massive of a business you could build in 10 years. If you started charging Right now, okay, like if you actually started putting like, because right now it's not a business, if you're not making money if you're not like, mindfully creating, if there's no model behind it, you don't have a business, which means it's not a side hustle. It's a hobby. Okay, so are you trying to build a hobby for 10? years? No, right? So mindset shift of like, this is a business for it to be a business. And he's a model that makes money and 10 years, this thing could I mean, Kathleen, and I, like my business is six years old, six and a half, braid is five and a half, being bosses a year and a half. Like, in 10 years, Kathleen and I will have taken over the world, okay. So like, whenever you think like, but if we were still in the phase right now, or like, oh, we're just still trying to figure out what this wants to be, and we're gonna main hustle like our businesses, like our other business like, then in 10 years, it would still be nothing. So like, you have to decide now that this is a business, and that it deserves a model that makes money even if you don't need it. And because your business needs it, for it to be something in 10 years, so that you can leave your main hustle and have this like flourishing, beautiful thing that does amazing things that you love and is feeding you, then it starts now. Okay, charge thoughts about that.
Kathleen Shannon 6:17
I think that maybe it's I'm asking the people that want to advertise with you, or do native content? Do you have a budget to accommodate me? Right? And so if they say, No, say, what can you do? Like it's kind of almost having scripts for yourself that you can start to have these conversations with these advertisers, right? So then you might even negotiate it. I mean, you're a lawyer, you could totally do this where you say, Okay, I will go ahead and do this post for you now for free. But here's what I want. I want you to mention me in your newsletter, like so then you can kind of think about what a trade might look like non monetary benefits, non monetary benefits, how are you being compensated? So start to think how am I being compensated by this, you could also say, I will do this for you, I want you to consider putting me in your budget for next year. And this is how much it will be. And this can kind of cover the amount you can add $500 or whatever to cover that first engagement that you did. So I don't necessarily think that it's bad to work for free with these brands that you really like. But I think it is opening the conversation to let them know that one, you're doing them a favor. And that to you expect them to reciprocate in some way, whether it's now or later. Does that make sense? And then also, like Emily said, I think that you might start to think beyond the sponsor model, because that's something that isn't entirely sustainable. And it's not something that you will feel like you have control over. So right now, what is the kind of content that you can create that will get those numbers up? I want you to start thinking about that. How can I just work to get the numbers up? That's how you're getting paid. In fact, that's what we're doing with being boss right now. It's not necessarily how many how many dollars can we make, but how can we increase our brand and our reach and our impact for creative entrepreneurs to start to think about that whenever it comes to your food blog, as well. So start to think about how you can just invest in getting those numbers up. Maybe every time someone pays you you're putting that money entirely back into Facebook advertising or creating really badass content. I can see you having like dinners that you host, you hire a photographer to come out and shoot it and you leverage that content for a good month. You have a video made I start really thinking about how you invest back in your brand in the content that you're creating. That's what's going to get you those numbers. Yeah, thank you.
Emily Thompson 8:43
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