How to Start a Freelance Business — Know Yourself

Knowing yourself, your strengths, weaknesses and skills is essential to starting any freelance business.

Jeanne Grunert

Virtuali

· ~9 min read · October 6, 2022 (Updated: October 20, 2023) · Free: Yes

According to the Small Business Administration, only around 25% of small businesses survive to their 15-year anniversary.

This year, my content marketing agency, Seven Oaks Consulting, celebrates that milestone. As I sat down to reflect on our first 15 years, I realized it wasn't a straight line journey, nor was it an easy one. I thought that others might be interested in the lessons learned along the way.

Lessons Learned from 15 Years in Business: A Series

In this series, I'll share the lessons that I learned over the years of building a business, struggling to keep it afloat during lean times, and finally, seeing it successfully through 15 years of growth and change.

From Startup to Survivor: My Insights on Building a Marketing Agency

How do you successfully build and grow a small business? How do you start with an idea, an impulse, a passion, and transform it into a thriving marketing agency?

More important still — how do you maintain the initial startup energy and use it as fuel to grow and thrive beyond what most business organizations predict is the failure threshold for the average small business?

The First Lesson: Know Thyself

The first lesson: By understanding and accepting myself as I am and not trying to be something I wasn't, I built a company that fueled my passion for marketing, writing, and supporting writers. Knowing myself led to a better business model that aligned with my core values.

It sounds crazy, I know. But everything about my business just sort of evolved.

I originally founded an ecommerce business in 2004, and my big life plan was to move to Virginia from Long Island, New York, and run my business from home. Eventually, I hoped to open a retail store, a warehouse, and a catalog company, so I put all my time and energy into building the equine art ecommerce business.

Unfortunately, the market had other ideas and the ecommerce business wasn't as successful as I'd hoped. My husband suggested I set up a business as a marketing consultant, leveraging my extensive career as a marketing director for publishers, financial companies, and retail businesses to offer marketing consulting services.

It was supposed to be a stopgap until the ecommerce business took off. But as the years went by, it quickly became apparent that the marketing agency had a brighter future than the ecommerce business.

The Typical Marketing Agency Mode Didn't Feel Right for Me

The marketing consulting work eventually merged with my freelance writing career to become content marketing consulting and services. We shut down the ecommerce business so that I'd have more time to grow the marketing work.

Despite this move, we weren't growing. I lacked an overarching vision that makes companies successful. Why was I running a marketing consulting business? Just to pay my bills? Or for a purpose larger than myself?

With the ecommerce business, I'd always had a vision of a purpose larger than myself — to create a business that could employ people in rural areas. I wanted to help the local economy, I wanted to offer gorgeous artwork that made people happy, and I wanted to give back to the local community, too.

The marketing work, on the other hand, paid the bills. It helped companies with their immediate problem. But the passion behind the work — and the vision that inspired it with the ecommerce company — was lacking.

I found the answer by taking time to go within, to return to my personal vision of success. It was only by understanding myself and what I deemed worth achieving that I understood how to define success for myself and not based on other people's models of success.

The Existing Models of Success Weren't for Me

The models available to me of what a thriving marketing agency looked like all seemed to be the opposite of who I was or what I wanted to be.

This is what the model of a "successful" marketing agency looked like to me:

Agencies had to be big — staffed by dozens of people — and have fancy office spaces. They created campaigns that wowed people and won big awards. Their clients were big Fortune 1000 companies. They won clients by networking — going to events, conferences, things like that.

All this felt wrong for me.

I love working from home — I founded Virtuali, a digital magazine on Medium, to promote remote work. I thrive on the meaningful relationships I built with clients, not from winning fancy awards. And networking events? I'm in an introvert. I grab a soft drink and hide in a corner. Conferences are an overwhelming sensory experience for me. I prefer neworking online.

But if that was what my industry deemed successful then it seemed to me I should want that, too. I started doing what other agencies were doing to attract and retain clients, but it just didn't feel right. It felt like wearing someone else's shoes: either pinching and restrictive or flopping around and tripping me up.

A Turning Point — Discovering What I Didn't Want

I had coffee with a local friend who had started a marketing agency a few years after I did. Her agency was the talk of our little rural community. She had grown it from one account to dozens, from one employee to over 20 people. She had clients throughout the state and her agency had won multiple awards!

Her agency was the epitome of what I felt others in the industry touting what a marketing agency should be.

But what she had, I didn't want.

What was wrong with me?

Actually, nothing. Her goals aren't my goals, and my goals aren't her goals. There's no one-size-fits-all model for business success for marketing agencies or for any other business. I had made the mistake of comparing what others have with what I have, and misunderstanding that just because the world deems something the model of success doesn't mean it is right for me.

Understanding my own personality and motivations became the key to success for agency.

Time Out

I took a few months from seeking new accounts to solving the nagging question of what purpose my agency should serve. I began to ask myself questions rather than to look outside myself for a model of success to copy.

A Deeper Way (ADW)

The first thing that changed my perspective and set me up for success was understanding where and how I thrived in my work. I credit A Deeper Way for these insights.

A Deeper Way (ADW) is a group of clinical psychologists who have invented a new test that combines 7 of the most popular personality assessments (Myers-Briggs, DISC, Enneagram, and so forth) into one test. As part of my writing work, I was asked if I would take their assessment and participate in a free session with them to interpret the results. (Note — they are not a current client and I receive no compensation for recommending them.)

I was amazed at how accurate the ADW results were.

Sitting down with one of their psychologists to review my personal assessment results was an eye-opening experience. First, the assessment was so accurate it was uncanny. It correctly identified my motivators and drivers (people over status, relationships over money or power). It helped me understand why I had loved working at certain companies over the years and why I had left others as quickly as I could. I was able to ask the psychologist many questions that had haunted me over the years of taking each of the separate assessments and never quite understanding why my results differed so dramatically from my peers.

Turns out, I am different from my marketing peers. My personality profile revealed hidden riches that if properly understood, I could leverage for my own success. It would look different from anyone else's vision of success, but who defines success? Do you define your own success or let the world define it for you?

I decided to define my own success, on my own terms, based on what made me happy. Because what made me happy made me a better consultant, leader, and coach, which is what my clients needed more than the showy, outward appearances of success.

This was the first step along a road of self-discovery that helped me improve my business in many ways:

I not only understood myself better, but, more importantly, accepted who I was for perhaps the first time in my life.
I learned that my personal way of work wasn't bad or good — it was simply me, and therefore, came with a unique set of skills and traits. If I leveraged my strengths, talents, and gifts, I would be happier and potentially better off, and, and in the end, my clients would benefit more from this than from my trying to copy everyone else.
I felt, more than ever, the call to create something different than the big marketing agency model I saw everywhere. Seven Oaks Consulting would indeed be a unique content marketing agency in more ways than one.

Personal Branding: Leaning Into My Marketing "Fascination Quotient"

My alumni group from New York University offers free professional development classes and during the pandemic I finally had the time to take advantage of them. If you have not connected with your alumni group, I highly recommend it. Many offer excellent virtual professional development seminars at no cost.

I signed up for a class on personal branding, which led me to a book and website: HowToFascinate.com (Again, this is my personal recommendation. I receive no compensation for sharing this information).

The "Fascination Quotient" revealed by this assessment helped me refine my personal online brand, and around that brand, I began to rethink the services my agency offered.

I paid particular attention to our niche. Should we be all things to all people, continue to work almost solely with publishers and other marketing agencies, or strike out on our own?

The Tilt

Joe Pulizzi is the founder of The Content Marketing Institute and he coined the term "content marketing" to refer to the unique space we now dominate: the intersection of digital marketing and rich creative writing that adds lasting value and makes an impact.

After years of providing both marketing and writing services to clients, I realized that what I was actually doing was content marketing. I subscribed to Joe's newsletter, "The Tilt", and used his articles to help me assess where our "tilt" should be.

"The Tilt" refers to the intersection of areas of strength and interest, along with marketplace demand. By completing the exercises suggested in Joe's work, I came up with our unique slant for the agency (written content for content marketing) and the niches: technology and manufacturing.

Because I now understood my own personality better and realized what our agency's unique niche should be, I was able to create a three-year plan and vision that included all the things that resonated with me personally, my personal brand and strengths, and marketplace demand for our services, along with the overarching vision of creating community (this time, for freelance writers!) and well-paying work for my writers.

Now, for the first time, all the puzzle pieces fit, and the picture that was emerging was one of a holistic, healthy content marketing agency that could gain marketplace traction and momentum.

Lesson One: Understand Yourself, Be True to Yourself

As you can see, it was a journey, rather than a single moment of "know thyself" that built the momentum needed to fuel our agency's growth.

As I continue to dive deeper into my agency's unique "tilt" and my personal leadership style, I realized that all I read and heard in the marketplace about how to create, build, and run a thriving marketing agency was wrong — for me!

Being true to myself in how I approached my work, the people I worked with, and the work itself became the momentum we needed to grow.