Add value first - Content Marketer Ross Simmonds
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Add value first - Content Marketer Ross Simmonds
Ross started freelancing on the side of a full-time agency job back in 2013. Fast-forward to today and he’s running his own agency that employs over a dozen people.
Ross was living in his parents’ basement in Nova Scotia when he began building up a roster of small, local clients. Over time, Ross’s portfolio grew to include Fortune 500 companies and some of the fastest-growing startups in the world.
He chats to Steve about how he found clients in the early days, how he’s built his reputation and business, and how he manages his personal brand alongside that of his agency.
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Transcript of the Being Freelance podcast with Content Marketer Ross Simmonds and Steve Folland
Steve Folland: As ever, how about we get started hearing how you got started being freelance?
Ross Simmonds: Yeah, so it kind of happened a little bit accidentally. I was working the nine to five at a content market at a bigger agency where we did traditional advertising. And I started to realize that this social media thing was going to last and I started to do it on the side. So I started to offer some social media and digital content marketing management efforts to a handful of small businesses, your mom and pop shops, local restaurants, et cetera. And then from there, I just started to see, "Wow, this whole entrepreneurship thing is very interesting. It's pretty fun." So I wanted to make it my full time gig. And after landing a few additional projects, I got to a point where I think I locked in one client that was probably worth about three grand a month and I was like, "That's enough. That's all I need. And I can quit my job." So I quit and I had that project and then the rest has been history ever since.
Steve Folland: Wow. And when was that?
Ross Simmonds: I would have quit probably back in 2013, 2014. So yeah, it would have been...
Steve Folland: How long would you say you were doing it on the side for?
Ross Simmonds: So I was doing it on the side for probably about six months, but I always had an itch for entrepreneurship. When I was in university, I ran a fantasy football blog and that was my first taste into the world of content marketing. I ran a blog about the Sims and video games like Madden. So I've always been into creating things and making money off of them, but the whole world of freelance really came to fruition after that first gig with an agency and then doing some projects on the side.
Steve Folland: Yeah. It's interesting hearing you using the term entrepreneurship, which entrepreneur and freelance are not necessarily the same thing, but obviously they interlace. It suggests that you had a real love for the business side of things, other than the skill of doing the marketing, for example.
Ross Simmonds: 100%. Yeah. I would say more than anything, I was interested in the freedom that came from being a freelancer and the name freelancer to me was like, "Oh, I get to have some free time maybe." That didn't actually work out too well, but the whole concept of being able to be in control of my schedule and my calendar was the most interesting part of it to me and really having control over what I did between the moment I woke up and the moment I went to bed. That was the key.
Steve Folland: So when you were going into those small businesses, the mom and pop shops as you put it, is that literally what you were doing, going into them?
Ross Simmonds: Yeah, so at first I started with actually sending messages. So I would send them messages and I would just be a good old fashioned Canadian boy who would say, "Hey, this is a great job that you're doing on social media, but I think you could do it a little bit better if you tried this and this." And sometimes those conversations would lead into, "Wow, thanks. That's very thoughtful. Why don't you swing by and tell us how we can do it and we'll pay you for your time and you can start to manage it?" And then I actually go in physically and start to sell to them.
Ross Simmonds: I also was able to build a bit of my clientele through two things, one, public speaking, as well as creating content. So I was writing and blogging while I worked at this agency about my thoughts on business and marketing. I can remember writing a piece called, "What every coffee shop should know about social media." And I then took that article and sent it to a bunch of people who ran coffee shops, hoping that they would turn into clients. And that worked out and I landed a client that was a coffee shop because of it.
Ross Simmonds: But in addition to that, I would go to local organizations and locations and actually do talks on social media and trends that were relevant in the world at that time. So there was a local chamber of commerce and I would reach out to them and I'd say, "Hey, can I come in and speak to all of your members about social media and content marketing?" I would reach out to local conference organizers and tell them that I wanted to do a talk on content marketing or social media. And they actually agreed, which was surprising because at the time I was not a good public speaker. I was not good at all. I remember the first time I went up and I spoke about marketing, I was a sweaty mess. I was dripping with sweat. I was awkward. It was not good. None of my jokes landed. It was a disaster in many ways, but I kept doing it. And over time, just through that consistency, it eventually paid off.
Steve Folland: What kept you doing it? Some people would just run a mile from that first experience.
Ross Simmonds: Yeah. For me, it was the end goal. So I always have had, for better or worse, this longterm perspective of being able to say, "I know where I want to be. I'm okay with being uncomfortable and I'm okay with constantly putting myself into this situation as long as eventually I can get to my outcome and my goal, which is being able to, again, work for myself and manage my own schedule, but also to achieve a certain level of success, whether it related to wealth or financial side." That was also a big driver of it.
Ross Simmonds: It's not that very kind of special story, but it was really like, I wanted to be able to pay the bills and not go broke. And I lived on the ramen noodle diet. I had been at a point where I couldn't fill up my gas tank and my car and I didn't want to get there again. So I kept signing up to do these things, putting myself into uncomfortable situations, knowing that I, at the end of the day, wanted to be able to afford the luxury of building a bit of wealth and unlocking the potential of running my own business.
Steve Folland: Cool. I love the fact, by the way, that you weren't just sending cold emails right at the beginning, what you just said there, you were actually assessing how you could help them.
Ross Simmonds: Right. Exactly. And that was the key. And I still to this day think that's a key part of how I've been able to build my reputation and build my career and build my business, it's the idea of adding value before you ask for value. So creating content about coffee shops, for example, and then sending them to coffee shop owners. I'm not asking them for anything. I'm just saying, "Hey, this is a piece that I developed. I think you'll find it interesting. Let me know if you want to chat about some of the ideas and the topics that I share here. I would be happy to sit down and chat with you." That's leading in with value. And by doing that, it breaks down that barrier and that awkward moment where a lot of freelancers make the mistake of just reaching out and trying to sell immediately.
Ross Simmonds: If you can come in with value, you're less intimidating and people don't think you really have a bit of an agenda or something that you're trying to do. They really do view it as, "Oh, this is a nice person just sending me along some valuable information." And if the information is valuable and they recognize, "Wow, this is so interesting. I know I can't do it," then you have an opportunity there where you can turn into the person who does it for them, which is the end game at the end of the day.
Steve Folland: I don't know what it's like where you live. Can you describe, is it a big place full of lots of businesses, for example? Was there plenty out there that you could help?
Ross Simmonds: No, not at all. So I'm from a small little place called Nova Scotia. We're a population of less than a million people. We are very small. There's a very tight knit community in terms of businesses. And I was very much the newbie, the new kid on the block locally, in terms of the marketing world. I was talking about social media and content before anyone else really was talking about it in the industry. So I came in at the perfect time, but what I quickly realized is that there really is no borders. In the internet age, in the world that we live in today, you're not limited to the borders of your province, your state, your country, wherever it is that you live. You're not limited to that. And as soon as that mindset triggered for me, that was when I started to unlock new opportunities outside of the market.
Ross Simmonds: So sure, in the first, I'd say year, I was very much focused on what was happening around me locally, but then something magical happened when I wrote a piece about how brands can connect with millennials through digital marketing. And when I wrote this piece, a lot of different things started to happen. Locally, I started to get a few new clients, but what was most fascinating was a brand out of Orlando reached out to me and I was like 24 at the time, maybe 23, still living in my parents' basement, drinking instant coffee. And I got this message and the brand wanted to fly me down and train their executive team on millennial marketing.
Ross Simmonds: Now I had no experience doing this. I wrote one blog post about millennial marketing and social media and they viewed me as an expert and sure enough, they flew me down and I did a session with them. I got paid for my time. I didn't know what to expect at the time. Again, I was very early in my freelance career, but that was when the light bulbs went off. You're not limited to your borders and your actual geolocation and you can start to do work with people pretty much anywhere in the world. Especially today with things like Stripe and with the various tools that allow you to manage payments from everywhere, TransferWise, PayPal, you name it. There's so much opportunity to do business outside of your local region. And I think that's the opportunity that really kickstarted started everything up a notch in terms of my career and my business is when I started to realize you can be in the smallest little province in Canada and still drive some amazing results and do work with everything from Fortune 500 brands down to the fastest growing startups in the world.
Steve Folland: What year did they contact you? Just to put it in perspective.
Ross Simmonds: That would have been in 2016. Steve Folland: So that's a few years on. How often were you blogging? And were you just writing for your own site or were you put pushing stuff out to other places?
Ross Simmonds: It was a blend. So I definitely did blog on other sites as well as my own and that was a bit of just a journey and an experiment that I was running at the time to figure this whole thing out. So I would write for other sites and other publications just to see what the results would be. And I quickly learned that I wasn't generating too much results outside of getting new followers and things like that on social media and not really clients.
Ross Simmonds: So I started to reduce the amount of time and energy that I was doing that. I started to publish on sites like Social Media Examiner. And that was great, to build up authority, just to be able to use that as more of leverage to when I pitched a client to say, "Hey, I've been published on Social Media Examiner." And they would say, "Oh, you must be an authority because you wrote for them." So I used it in that way, rather than viewing it as a way to generate new business, more than anything, I would be able to share that content with potential clients and say, "Look at this great piece I wrote for Social Media Examiner. Look at this great piece I wrote for a bigger agency or for a bigger brand, et cetera." And use that to kind of give myself a little bit of validation and additional kind of credibility.
Ross Simmonds: In terms of the frequency of how often I published, there was a time when I actually set a challenge to myself where I said, "I'm going to write a blog post every day for 30 days." And today you will not find any of those blog posts because they were so bad. I challenged myself to do that and I deleted every blog post because they were trash. They were garbage. And I think, again, you live through experience, but I learned that creating a bunch of mediocre content does no good for anyone. It's great from a training perspective and I was able to learn the hard way that that doesn't work well, but I wouldn't encourage anyone to just try to create content for the sake of creating content, unless you really have a lot to say. You could tell from some of those pieces that I was grasping for straws in terms of the concepts and the ideas that I was sharing.
Ross Simmonds: Now from a publishing standpoint, it's more to be a three to four times a month, rather than every single day for a cadence of publishing. And the publishing efforts are not limited to just my site. Those are pieces that I would publish on LinkedIn, on medium.com, et cetera, as well as on LinkedIn and social content as well.
Steve Folland: Flipping heck. Right. Where do we go next? So much I want to talk to you about. But let's go back into your story then I guess. So basically, you just regularly kept plugging away, building up your reputation and the work started to change, did it?
Ross Simmonds: So yeah. Let me take you back a bit. So in the early days, it was a lot of blog writing and pure social media management. So we would manage the... And we, I mean me, I would manage the social media accounts for these brands. So I would tweet for them. I would manage their Facebook accounts. I would manage their Foursquare accounts, because Foursquare was a thing back then. All of those things I would essentially manage and operate for them. Over time I started to also start publishing content for them, writing blog posts, writing eBooks for them, et cetera. And that's when things really started to kind of connect in terms of the ROI, because I was seeing traffic going up and to the right. I was seeing them starting to get downloads on this blog post and this content.
Ross Simmonds: But with all of the new work was also coming a lot of late nights and late evenings. And it was getting to a point where I was like, "Okay, this is ridiculous. This is a lot of work. This is me essentially burning myself out. I need to do things a little bit differently." So I started to bring in people to assist, other freelancers, to help all around projects here and there. Then I realized that by bringing in other freelancers, it puts me in a tough spot because I don't control their calendar and if they're full up, I have to go find someone else. So eventually I started to hire folks as well and eventually built up a bit of a team around myself to execute on all of these strategies.
Ross Simmonds: And this is the evolution of me going from essentially rosssimmonds.com, which was a one person shop doing all things for any brand, from strategy to content creation, to social media management, to building a full team with Foundation Marketing, which is now kind of an agency, but still a lot of clients come through the rosssimmonds.com brand as the original freelancer and the original creator who developed the business.
Ross Simmonds: Again, to go back a little bit into time when it was the just pure rosssimmonds.com and myself running the ongoing efforts, the biggest shift was recognizing there's only so many hours in a day and I continuously was able to raise my prices and raise my prices, but people still wanted to work with me. And the one thing I couldn't get is more time. So I had to start becoming more scalable by bringing in other people. And that was definitely a game changer for the business as a whole.
Steve Folland: Were you worried at all about actually making full time employees?
Ross Simmonds: Terrified. Terrified. Absolutely terrified because I had a lot of fear around the fact that, if I do hire someone full time, what happens if I can't get new work? What happens if I can't generate new business? So I took a long time to make that decision and I took a long time before I actually hired. I did a lot of prep work to make sure that I could actually afford to hire that first person, as well as making sure that when I did hire that person, I had some training materials laid out in the works to make sure that they could be successful. But that same feeling that I had when it came to hiring that first employee was the same feeling that I have when I was trying to make the decision of whether or not I should quit my full time job to become a freelancer.
Ross Simmonds: And when I realized it was the same feeling and I went back into time and I realized, okay, when I made that transition from employee to full time freelancer and I was able to do in just one year more than three times the amount of revenue I would have gotten from my salary, it triggered to me, "Ross, this is probably a good idea because the last time you felt this way, the last time that you felt like this isn't going to work out, it actually turned out to be the best decision of your life. So why don't you try to hire someone and see if this is again, one of those situations where you feel uncomfortable, but at the end of it, you end up being better off?" And it turned out that that was going to be the case.
Steve Folland: And so Foundation Marketing is what you then became. Were you like an actual company all sitting in an office together? Or were you remote? How did it work?
Ross Simmonds: Yeah, so I always wanted to be a fully remote company. I knew when I worked in an office, I found it very difficult to produce my best work when people always wanted to pick my brain and have conversations with me and talk about what they did on the weekend, et cetera. And that's just the type of person I am. I wanted to be able to just do my work and thrive at it. So I wanted to create a culture where that could happen as well and attract people who are open to that and that would have been through a remote team. So we intentionally have been fully remote before even the world was forced to become remote with COVID-19. And that's kind of been for a long time one of our great advantages of being able to thrive.
Ross Simmonds: We have no overhead costs in terms of office space. We do buy our teammates computers, we have great benefits, and we provide them with a handful of devices. We have an unlimited Amazon budget for the team, et cetera. But all of those things were only feasible because we were able to say, "Yeah, let's do this thing fully remote and hire people from wherever they are in the world."
Steve Folland: Yeah. I'm intrigued. Where is everyone in the world?
Ross Simmonds: Yeah. So there's eight of us right now full time. And then we have a handful of part time, I think probably six or seven part-timers as well. The team has been spread out over the years, from all different ends of the world, from Europe throughout America, Canada. We have one colleague who was out of Australia and the time zone on that was wild. That was a very interesting experience and I loved it. But at the same time, it was very, very hard on everyone, especially those with kids like myself, because the calls had to happen in the early, early mornings or late into the night. But it's been fun. I think right now the vast majority are definitely in Canada, but we have some spread out throughout Europe, as well as down in the US. We have a great editor out of Texas. We've got some folks who are out of even Croatia. Yeah. It's quite spread out.
Steve Folland: Eight. And then obviously more on top of that. That's a lot. So I'm just sitting here thinking, what's your role? Basically is what I'm thinking, because obviously there was a point when you first started where you created the guide, you bring on one person. But now you have eight people and lots of other people, how do you... I'm so on the edge of putting words in your mouth, what's your role? That's actually my question.
Ross Simmonds: What do I do? No worries.
Steve Folland: Yeah, because it can change.
Ross Simmonds: It does. Yeah. And it has changed. It's changed quite a bit. And I think my role now is less of... So before, I would have to do essentially everything. So I would manage clients, I would manage the relationship. I would do the work in terms of creating the content, creating the social media posts, managing the accounts, sending every email, et cetera, being the final approval, making all the edits, et cetera. Now I essentially provide the high level strategic direction and guidance around the projects. And that is also starting to become less and less of something that I do and more of the efforts that the senior leadership team is doing. But it's more of continuously trying to replace myself is what I would say my job is now. It's constantly trying to find things to get myself off of and allowing me to focus on what I do really, really well, which is create content about marketing and business and growth and that whole world.
Ross Simmonds: So I've been spending most of my time now, if I look at the time sheets, in creating content, as well as business development. So actual selling, closing clients, talking to clients, building those relationships, expanding the contracts, et cetera, has been a big part. And then I would say the other piece that's important that I spend a lot of time on is just the culture and the management of the team and ensuring that everyone is able to achieve their goals personally and professionally.
Steve Folland: I love the fact that you've now ended up back in a place where you're doing what you love in the form of creating the content and content marketing and things like that. But was it a hard transition to get to that point?
Ross Simmonds: Yes. So it definitely was. I think it's a difficult spot for anybody who is in the weeds at any point with their career. Especially if you are a doer and you love to do the work, it is always difficult to say, "I'm going to pass off the doing to other people." And it's still an ongoing challenge. I love creating content. I love creating new things. I love creating new strategies, new plans. I love managing content. And I still, and I know this is kind of not humble in any ways, I still think I can create amazing content for any brand period. The best content. But I can't do it for every brand and every client. So I need to step back and allow my team to execute their own way and do great work as well.
Ross Simmonds: And that's challenging to step back and say, "I'm okay with that happening and allowing other people to thrive." But I've intentionally tried to create training internally to help everyone become great. And we've got some amazing people on our team creating content for clients. And some of them, I will say, are also creating content better than I could for our clients. And that's what the goal is. It's to hire people and work with people who can do work better than I can. And we're getting to that point, which is awesome to see.
Ross Simmonds: But yeah, I would say the difficulty is more rooted in ego than anything, but once you get over the ego of saying, "Yeah, I'm the only one who can do this," and you accept the fact that others can, then it makes life a lot easier to offload that work and it makes it easier for me to be able to step away from the keyboard and actually take a vacation and not actually worry about whether or not, when I get back, everything's going to be on fire.
Steve Folland: Oh, good. I was going to ask you about work life balance. You said the word vacation. So that's... At least in the past year or two, it sounds like you've managed not just to work all the time. How do you feel about that balance?
Ross Simmonds: Yeah, so I feel like, for me, it's been great over the last little bit. Early days, early days of building the business, there was no such thing as... I still kind of call it work life integration, but there was definitely more integration with work than life. I was on my keyboard from the moment I woke up until the moment I went to bed. And as much as people say that some people don't like their work, but I love my work. And I loved that grind, being into it, I couldn't do it now just because I'm getting old and I get... I used to pull 3:00 AM-ers, if I went to bed today at 3:00 AM, it would not be pretty. It's not going to play well physically at all.
Ross Simmonds: So early days, I spent a lot of time working and I loved it, but now I recognize the limitations of myself and I recognize the importance of taking a break and enjoying family time. And I've got a little one now and another one on the way. So we've been doing a ton of fun travel. We've been to Disneyland a handful of times. We've been able to... I do a lot of public speaking, so I get to bring the family with me. We've been able to go to Stockholm. We've been all over the world, Ireland, Amsterdam, all over. And it's again, because I intentionally believe that you have to, at a certain point, start to recognize you're not working just to work, you're working to live.
Ross Simmonds: So when you are at that point where you can step away from the keyboard and you can take a break, take a break and take it hard. Enjoy it. Unplug completely. Do it with intention. And I live by that. I love my moments when I'm able to completely get away from the keyboard and I look forward to every moment that I can with the family and with the friends.
Steve Folland: Now I'm pretty sure I'm right, correct me though, that you started freelance, it's turned into a company, but we spoke at the beginning about that sort of buzz of entrepreneurship. That it's not the only company that you've then created since then.
Ross Simmonds: No, it's not. Yeah. I've run a lot of different businesses over the life cycle of my life so far. And I don't think that will ever change. I'm an entrepreneur at heart. I like creating things, bringing them to the world and seeing how the world responds to it. I've created everything from software companies all the way through to cleaning companies that are operating today and cleaning people's homes. I've never cleaned anyone's home, but we have a team that does that. I run a handful of media properties so I have websites on various topics. We have an e-commerce site that I run and I've done a few small angel investments as well. And again, this is only because I am a naturally curious person who loves to learn new things and try new things and tinker. I view life truly as an experiment and the more I can experiment, the more I can learn things. So I love having fun with this thing called life. And yeah, I don't think I'll ever stop creating things.
Steve Folland: So were you creating some of those companies... In your past life as it were, before we kicked off this story where you were at the agency and then you left, you'd already done some of these before that, had you?
Ross Simmonds: I did. So let me take you back into time when I was a really, really young kid. I built a board game when I was probably 10 or 11 years old and I built this board game with one of my cousins and we legitimately took that board game and started to sell it throughout our school. And that was kind of my first taste into entrepreneurship. And neither of my parents are entrepreneurs. Neither of them were big into entrepreneurship. There was just something in me, even back then that just said, "You should create a board game." And I just created it and started to sell it.
Ross Simmonds: And then all through high school, I would sell durags and wave caps and hair products and things like that. Again, just because I wanted to be able to afford the poutine at lunch and to be able to put a nice radio in my car. Back then, speakers were cool. If you had cool speakers then that was nice. So I was just playing. And then in university I had that fantasy football blog, but I was also selling things on eBay. I had affiliate websites, selling things. Like you mentioned, I've always been built this way to create new things. And it's, in my mind, a bit of a game where it's just a fun, ongoing game that never ends until you essentially die. So I think at a certain point, I will probably stop playing the game and just relax on a beach, but for now I'm still having fun playing it. It's pretty cool.
Steve Folland: How old are you now?
Ross Simmonds: I'm 32. In September, I'll be 32. I'm still 31, but yeah. 32.
Steve Folland: Wow. One thing that really struck me though, is that you've created, now it's grown into an agency, but you maintain that rosssimmonds.com that it sprung from. That's kind of key, right?
Ross Simmonds: It is. 100%. So especially in the service side, I think at least in my experience, I don't know if it will last long term, but in the short term, especially in the early days of growth, people buy from people. And because they are able to see and connect with me as a human, they are more likely to buy. So I think we, or I made the right decision in terms of building up the Ross Simmonds brand, if you want to call it that, at the same time developing the Foundation brand.
Ross Simmonds: Now we're going into an interesting period where we are trying to elevate the brand of Foundation because again, not every client is going to work with Ross and not every client is going to have an interaction with me. Maybe at the beginning for a short period of time, but I'm not going to be the person they work with longterm or consistently. And the only way that we can grow is to make that a reality. So I think the key for any freelancer who is listening is, don't underestimate the power of your own name and your reputation. Even if you do have the ambitions of someday creating an agency or creating a bigger brand and business around it, your name is still going to be extremely powerful and important. So having your name associated with your business, or at least associated with the thought leadership within your space is so important.
Ross Simmonds: If you're a designer, be on Dribbble and have your name as the person on Dribbble. If you are a videographer, have your content on Vimeo with your name on it. If you are a photographer, have an Instagram account with your name on it and make sure that you're plugging your name because people are going to go to Google and look for your name. And if you show up in Google, that is a good thing. I remember the first time I typed in Ross Simmonds on Google and I started to see pictures of like Rick Ross and I started to see Richard Simmonds and all of these people and some random dude named Ross. And I was like, "This is horrible. Nobody's going to ever know who I am."
Ross Simmonds: So I started to create content with Ross Simmonds and talked about marketing, talked about business. That way, there was no mistake when somebody went to the internet and looked for me that they would find the person who is interested in marketing and then along that journey, they would eventually find Foundation Marketing, the avenue in which I could sell to them and work with them.
Steve Folland: Yeah, no, that's great. Because I think a lot of people, even if it still just them, wrestle with, "Shall I go with my name? Shall I go with a company name?" And it feels like an either or thing, but actually you've shown that it can work in tandem.
Ross Simmonds: Yeah. 100%. I think it's important to try to find a way to make both work. Again, if you do have the ambition of just staying a solo entrepreneur with no other team and you want to just have it be the Ross Simmonds Show, then that's okay. You can do that. And I think owning your name at least is still something that you should embrace and lean into. But yeah, I think there's a lot of different ways to go about it, but I think there's a lot of value in having both, if you are trying to build up a team and an agency, so to speak.
Steve Folland: Yeah. And I notice on the Ross Simmonds website this is, you have, well you call it step one, step two, step three. So this is your, "Ready to start bringing in more leads." This is how it looks right now anyway in the summer of 2020. And I guess people will call those sort of lead magnets, you're trying to get them on your list or something like that. And you've got a blog post, a video, and a guide. Are these things that you've created over time and have eventually ended up there? Or have you consciously set out to do it? And I'm also intrigued as to which you feel has works best? Do you get that kind of feedback?
Ross Simmonds: Great question. So this is something that we've been tinkering with and testing quite a bit. More than anything, most people just sign up for my own personal newsletter when they get on the website and they don't actually go through the steps, which is kind of a broken user experience because of that. But when they do, we're not actually, I'll be honest, I'm not seeing that many people clicking on step one, step two, or step three. Most people are actually just signing up for the newsletter and then going back to my navigation and going to the blog and then reading things that I'm publishing and that I'm creating on a regular basis. So the steps are something that I would say, especially if the team is listening, something that we should probably revisit ASAP. Steve Folland: I love your honesty. Thank you very much. That's nice to hear that, because there's three really big chunky things there, but actually they're quite happy then just to keep on scrolling, see the fact that you've been listed on all these impressive things, some great testimonial, and then they're signing up.
Ross Simmonds: Exactly. Yeah. And I think the goal with those, or with the post I want to share with folks one of the most popular blog posts that I've developed and one of the pieces that generates a lot of traction and ultimately converts well. The video itself, I don't know why I'm linking to it still. It is a very old video, so I need to update that. It's two years old. So when your listeners hear this, all of this is going to be changed. And the third one is a guide, which is still really good. So the guide is still good and I'll probably keep that up there, but the video needs to change and the blog post needs to change. So thank you. You've given me a free consult on my website that I will be able to edit and change right after this call.
Steve Folland: Do you know, that's actually really comforting though in that, because it looks amazing.
Ross Simmonds: Right. Appreciate that.
Steve Folland: But it's also interesting to hear the fact, "Yeah, but actually I'm not happy with that there and this bit doesn't work and..." That's actually a really nice to hear. I wish you luck in fixing it.
Ross Simmonds: Thank you. Appreciate it.
Steve Folland: Obviously, it started with entrepreneurship, it's run throughout it. Is it something that is just inside you or have you, I don't know, studied business or have business mentors or signed up for courses? Is it just in you or do you seek advice from others?
Ross Simmonds: Yeah, so I think I should start by prefacing, even in junior high and high school, elementary school, my nickname was Shy Ross. So as much as I like creating things and I like developing things, entrepreneurship didn't necessarily come natural for me because I was a very shy and introverted kid. And I didn't like... I get a lot of energy still to this day from being alone and being by myself, but I wanted to achieve certain things. So I pushed myself out of my comfort zone and started to read a lot of books, watch a lot of YouTube videos, ask a lot of questions to anybody who seemed to be an entrepreneur. My grandfather did run a paving company, so I was able to rely on him a lot to ask questions about business and what he was able to do in his career. But for the most part, it just came down to a commitment to knowing, I want to create a certain life and I'm going to put in the work and tap into the resources available to learn it.
Ross Simmonds: So I've read a lot of books. I continue to read a lot of books. I wouldn't say that I've had any direct mentors. I think the best mentor that I've ever had is the internet and this amazing site called Google where you can go there and find information about anything. If you want to become a freelance designer, you can go to YouTube and pretty much learn from some of the best in the world on how to become a wizard at Illustrator, at Photoshop, or any other solution or service. So I think the internet is my mentor today and it continues to be. And I think anyone who wants to be a freelancer or is a freelancer, never lose sight of the fact that your curiosity to learn new things can be key to giving you cheat codes to essentially win and succeed in your career.
Steve Folland: If you could tell your younger self one thing about being freelance, what would that be?
Ross Simmonds: Don't be afraid and ignore any type of fear around judgment. I think the biggest thing that held me back was the fear of what other people will think. And I think it's important to have the courage to just be yourself and create things and get them out there to the world, learn how the world responds to it, and then continue to shift and continue to react based off of that.
Steve Folland: That's great. Ross, it's been really great to chat to you.
Ross Simmonds: Well, thanks for having me on Steve. Really appreciate this conversation and I hope your listeners enjoy it. And my hat's off to you for delivering so much value to freelancers around the world. I know the community appreciates it as well.