Scaling Up And Staying Grounded
My business was born from a clear need, or two rather.
One was to clear my student loans while taking care of other financial responsibilities.
The other was to help small business owners who are feeling frustrated and lost with design. I’ve always loved helping people and dreamt of one day becoming an art therapist to combine my love for art with psychology.
As a designer, I don’t want to just create a “pretty design”, send an invoice over, and have it paid. I want my design and services to actually solve problems real people have, whether they’re entrepreneurs or consumers. Also, by freelancing, I get my work to intersect with fields I love being a part in—wellness, charitable initiatives, beauty and professional services for social impact and career transformation.
I decided to scale my freelancing to a service-based business during the pandemic; a rather ironic resolution when many businesses were struggling. It wasn’t a see-saw of thriving while other businesses were just about surviving, but instead giving other businesses support to move forward in the jungle gym of online branding! Running a business is not linear, and that’s why I like being transparent about the highs and lows—I see my business empowering other small businesses and others in general during their hard times and celebrating with them through the good times. Since my decision to upscale my business, my side hustle has ballooned from graphic, web and digital design, to bigger bubbles of brand development, web design and content marketing. I wasn’t a whole-rounded expert at these fields, I have learnt as I started and am still learning more with every project I take on.
You can do it, with help and boundaries
Upscaling a business may sound like taking on more work, but it is also letting go of more! You may want to clutch onto and learn every component of your business, but let the experts do what they do best. Outsourcing has helped me take a huge weight off my shoulders: content, marketing, and bookkeeping gets done while giving me more time to concentrate on the core of my business. That doesn’t mean I spend all my remaining time (that isn't put into my full time job) on client work. I communicate with my clients (which is extremely important yet overlooked) during the initial onboarding stages about what my hours are, and that I appreciate being contacted only during that window of time. The beauty of running your own business is YOU decide your hours, and not let work seep into all your waking time. This also means weighing your resources against your expected goals. Being a one-person business, there are only so many clients I can onboard so that those clients get the time and quality that they deserve. I also have to account for normal human feelings that come with…well, being human. I’m not always at my most efficient, I’m sometimes down in the dumps, unmotivated, or swept up in life. And life will happen, no doubt. So building clear-cut boundaries, respecting them, planning out projects with accommodating timelines, and containing my business within certain hours allows me to unwind and deflate when life feels a little too much, without it impacting my professional work.
Make networking work for you by just being you
I am used to having a small but firm circle and getting help and support from it. However, to grow my business, I had to network (and I am a very shy person so you can see how terrifying this is for me). And I don’t mean network in a professional, formal, overly-enthusiastic way. I’m not built for marketing myself on social media, so I didn’t force myself to take that route. I just connected with my peers and prospective clients in the most authentic and honest version of myself, the only way I can be! It was word of mouth from that point on. One client would refer me to another, or a freelancer with whom I had a small conversation with would refer me to other people who needed services like mine. You don’t have to turn the dial to maximum on your extroverted self to network, or slip a hyperconnected ‘hello’ into ten different LinkedIn inboxes in one day (plus humans don’t like those icky pitches), you can be genuine with every peer or prospective client you talk to, even if it’s just one person a week or a month. Build an authentic relationship (even if it’s based on discussing Netflix shows), and that may leave an impression strong enough for the other person to remember you when they come across a project that needs your skills!
Patience is a crucial building block
The key ingredient to scaling a business is patience. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will your business be. We perceive full-time jobs as the norm, and entrepreneurship as the fun, easy job that brings in extra dollars. But maximizing a full-steam business will mean sifting over boring forms, learning how to draft business proposals and late nights. Not always fun stuff.
Once you’re done getting the knack of balancing the dull work alongside the tasks you like, you may not even see the returns soon. So celebrate the small wins—even something as tiny as clearing out your inbox—until the big ones come along—like back-to-back client sign ups!
