Career Makeover Wednesdays: Daycare Duty to Writer Extraordinaire

Well…...Gina is on a roll! Who knew she would be busy so quickly with an influx of writing projects? Even she is surprised - way to go Gina!

While Gina is certainly thrilled with the fact that she is getting more and more projects, she continues to work on aspects of her makeover that we have identified as challenges. One of her challenges is self-marketing, which includes fine-tuning her ability to describe to potential clients what she offers, as well as continuing to network to win new business and realize her goal of making a living at writing.

In our next coaching session, Gina talked about how much of her work was coming from existing clients and from the Internet, which is going to “keep her busy for weeks”. While we had previously discussed face-to-face networking strategies to secure new business on a local level, Gina’s excitement on the amount of work she was getting through the Internet was palpable.

I challenged Gina to do to two things:

1. Identify how she was getting this steady stream of clients (i.e. what strategies was she applying) and what was it about the medium of the Internet that made it easier for her to get clients, aside from the statements she shared in her last post when she described herself as being more comfortable interacting with others via this method (i.e. being more of an "introvert").
   


2. Continue with face-to-face strategies (i.e. meeting with the local Realtor) to ensure she was addressing her desire to get clients on the local level. This included following-up with the women she met at the event she attended and schedule a lunch or coffee to talk about each other’s businesses and/or to pitch one of the interested parties on her services.
   
   Now on to the dreaded pitch. Why is creating a “pitch” important? Being able to describe yourself and what you want is critical.
   
   I’ll never forget when I was job hunting 10 years ago and my sister connected me with a friend of hers at Discovery. When we talked on the phone the first question he had was “what do you want to do”? Uhhhh….I couldn’t put it together! While I was looking for an opportunity that combined HR with my consulting skills, I could not articulate what I wanted into words…and I lost the opportunity to have someone inside a great company identify opportunities for me and pass my resume along.
   
   It’s the same thing in business: if you don’t know what you want when you are talking to someone, or, you don’t know how to describe your business in such a way that people want to continue listening or want to hire you, then you are wasting your time and more importantly – OTHER people’s time.

Here are a few pointers I shared with Gina in creating a pitch:

1. Make it memorable. While the point of an elevator speech is to be concise, it has to achieve the goals of letting people know what you do, how they can benefit, and why you are unique. Still stuck? Write down all of the above and extract from your brainstorm the nuggets that you can use for your pitch. It is also helpful to write down examples of work you have already performed for clients and the benefits they have received by hiring you.
   


2. Feel good about it. If you are passionate about what you are telling others about yourself and your business, it's a sure bet that others will get hooked on your energy.
   


3. Practice! Try it out on your friends, family, whoever feels most comfortable. At first it can be awkward, but others can help you gain greater ease so you can deliver it when it counts.
   

Lastly, Gina and I focused on the adjustments that she was experiencing in getting used to her new life in the 24/7 lane as a professional writer. She mentioned the transition not only of not watching children all day, but using and managing her time much differently. Now that Gina is super busy, it will be interesting to hear how she is managing her time and getting her work done, and how she is feeling about how she is spending her time.

In fact, it raises an interesting point: the challenges of transitioning into something new. We have all experienced it: we start a new job, we are out of work for a period of time and our job becomes looking for a job and filling our day with those actitivites, or, in Gina’s case, starting a new business. I asked her to observe how she feels about how she fills her days and how satisfied she is with how she spends her time and the end result.

If you have strategies for Gina on how you adjusted to a new situation and made it successful, we’d love to hear from you! Email us at trueprofessions@gmail.com.