Survival skills - Copywriter and Author Sarah Townsend
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Survival skills - Copywriter and Author Sarah Townsend
Sarah’s been freelance for more than twenty years now and she says it’s taken her “a damn long time” to get to where she is. She’s gone from saying yes to everything and trying to do it all herself - including raising two children as a single parent - to taking herself seriously as a business owner and finding boundaries, balance and a way to do more than just survive.
These days, after turning fifty, Sarah gives herself Fridays off and outsources the jobs she doesn’t enjoy. She works from the gym (when we’re not in lockdown), where she breaks up her day with exercise and feels energised by the buzz of people around her.
In her book, Survival Skills for Freelancers, released recently in June 2020, Sarah shares the biggest lessons she’s learnt about working for yourself without burning out.
The book was one of our Being Freelance Book Club reads for summer 2020, you can read what we thought of here.
More from Sarah Townsend
Useful links
Freelance Feels by Jenny Stallard
Being Freelance Book Club review of Sarah’s book
More from Steve Folland
Join us in the Being Freelance community
Transcript of the Being Freelance podcast with Copywriter and Author Sarah Townsend and Steve Folland
Steve Folland: As ever, let's get started hearing how you got started being freelance.
Sarah Townsend: Wow, it's a bit of a long story. Do you want the long version or the short version? I guess in a nutshell, I didn't go to uni. I started working in financial services admin, which sounds very dull, but it gave me a good background for learning customer service and all that kind of thing. And while I was with financial services company, Eagle Star, I moved into their Marketing Department, found I absolutely loved marketing and three years later opted for voluntary redundancy. Applied for a job with my publishing company who were publishing our customer magazine at the time. They were based down in Bristol and they were like, "Yeah, great. Come and work for us. You can be one of our editors and account managers."
Sarah Townsend: So I went there, worked there for three years doing customer magazines for various companies. And basically from there, I got pregnant in 1999 and they didn't want me to come back part time. It was the late '90s. It just wasn't a thing, really. Working remotely wasn't a thing. Part time working, being flexible around parenthood just wasn't really an option. And they suggested I went freelance. Hadn't even occurred to me at that point. Thought about it while I was on maternity leave. Seemed like a good idea. And 20 years later, 21 years later here I am.
Steve Folland: Oh, my goodness. So they suggested you went freelance to do freelance stuff for them?
Sarah Townsend: Yeah. Well, originally they said, "If you go freelance, we will supply you with some work to tide you over." So I did editing and proofreading for the company that I was working for. And I spent the whole of my maternity leave basically sending out letters. Remember letterhead? There was no email in those days. There was barely any internet. I certainly didn't have internet on my computer. And I sent around messages to any businesses that I thought I might fancy working for. And a couple of them bit really early on. And yeah, it's built from there.
Steve Folland: So when you were sending those letters, which let's face it, these days could be an email, were you researching the company that you were doing or were they like a blanket message?
Sarah Townsend: It was probably a blanket message, if I'm perfectly honest. I didn't really know the first thing about marketing my own business. I didn't know the first thing about being a self-employed person or how to get clients. There was no social media that I could talk about who I was and what I did or build the relationships or the connections that you need to turn strangers into friends and ultimately into clients. It was a bit of a scattergun approach. Let's be honest. I didn't have much of a strategy. I think I got lucky. What can I say?
Steve Folland: So how did it grow? You're starting a business as well as a family.
Sarah Townsend: Yeah, I started off doing three days a week when my daughter was really little and she was in nursery part time. And yeah, I worked quite short days, I think, 9:00 to 4:00 to begin with. And as she got older and went to primary school and then my son was born and really I built my business around being a mom. So I knew nothing about being a mom. I knew nothing about running a business. It was tough. It was really tough. And it was quite the juggling act. I was rubbish at boundaries, absolutely rubbish. And yeah, didn't really know when to say no to work. Pretty much took on anything that I was offered as many freelancers do early days. Yeah, it was difficult.
Steve Folland: Has your business changed much since then?
Sarah Townsend: Yeah, it has. At some point, some indeterminable point, I got serious about being a business rather than just a freelancer. A lot of people don't treat it as a business and don't necessarily adopt the mindset of a business owner, where you keep your finances separate, separate bank account, you pay an accountant to do your accounts properly, you have a proper brand, you get a proper website and you start investing in your business. So certainly as my kids got older, when they went to secondary school, that was a really big turning point for me because suddenly I had all this time and it was quite a difference. Suddenly I was able to start work when my son got the school bus half seven in the morning and I'd work until he got home, which was long days. And it took a bit of adjusting to, but that was, I think, the point where I thought, "Right, I'm going to do this. I'm going to take this more seriously."
Steve Folland: And how did you continue to get new clients? After a while did it just take care of itself or was it always a consistent thing that you were going for?
Sarah Townsend: Yeah, I think after a while, I mean a long while, to be fair. To begin with, when there was barely any internet, obviously there was no social media at all. Email was very new. Nobody really knew what they were doing all that well. So a lot of it was very hit and miss, it felt very trial and error. As social media started, I was a bit of an early adopter with Twitter and things like that, so I started building up my network that way. And certainly for the first, probably 12, at least, years of running a business I didn't do any networking. I was terrified of networking. When I got over myself and started going out there, putting myself out there as a professional copywriter, I did expand my network and I guess I just nurtured those contacts.
Sarah Townsend: And from those people getting to know me and getting to know more about what I did and who I did it for, they would start to think of me. I wasn't necessarily directly plugging my business to them, but it's that no luck in trust thing, isn't it? So as they got to know who I was and they started to believe that I could do a good job and I was building up the social proof because I'd worked for a lot of businesses by then, I had quite a lot of examples of my work that I could share. And yeah, I guess just started building a reputation and it grew from there.
Steve Folland: How about the pricing side of it? How did you get to grips with that?
Sarah Townsend: Hmm, I think that's probably if not the biggest challenge, I think probably the biggest challenge about being freelance is the isolation possibly. But the pricing, knowing what to charge is so difficult because you feel like you're in this little freelance bubble and you don't really have the context of being in perhaps an office where you can... Perhaps, if you do use a coworking space, you can talk to your colleagues and your peers about what they charge. There's research out there that a lot of groups have put together, certainly from a copywriter's perspective. But I think, I was a bit finger in the air with it all really. I didn't have a strategy. To be honest, Steve, I've never really had much of a strategy for anything. Even the book wrote itself. I never had a plan to write a book, but I think with pricing, I've become more confident in knowing, it's so easy to say, value your own worth, don't undervalue your expertise.
Sarah Townsend: I had these headshots done at the weekend and I just had to tell her that she was undercharging because quite often I feel like I want to pay people more than they ask me for things, because I almost feel guilty because I'm kind of like, "Well, I earn a decent wage, a decent living from what I do." It worries me a little bit when people undercharge, but I guess if you're making a living from that and that's what you feel comfortable doing, then that is going with your gut, ultimately. It is difficult to get that context, I think, when you don't have other people to ask. Perhaps if you're in your own Facebook group, the Being Freelance Group on Facebook, if somebody put out a post saying, "Look, someone's asked me for a logo design. What would you guys be prepared to pay for that?" I think those groups are brilliant for that because there's a certain element of what goes on in the group stays in the group.
Sarah Townsend: I don't think anybody would go, "Oh my God, somebody wanted to charge x for a logo. Oh, who do they think they are?" I think there's as much of a stigma around undercharging as that is overcharging because with the overcharging you have the little self doubt. People are going to think I'm not worth that much and who does she think she is to charge that much? But I think you've got to get over that nagging voice in your head. And you've got to develop the confidence to feel comfortable enough with what you want to charge, what sits right with you. And I also think it can be helpful to role play conversations with money, with a trusted friend or your partner. I used to do it with my kids. I've got grown up kids. And sometimes I'd say to my daughter, "Oh, I want to ask this much for this job. It feels about right. And can I just have a practice conversation with you?"
Steve Folland: Well, my experience of kids even half their age is that they are excellent negotiators.
Sarah Townsend: Yeah, and if you brought your kids up to be excellent negotiators, go you because I certainly have with mine.
Steve Folland: Yeah, I do sometimes think, "Oh my God, this is such hard work." And I think, "One day this is going to be such a brilliant skill for somebody else to be at the end of. I just wish it wasn't me." When it comes to marketing yourself these days... If I look at your website at some point, I notice that you have sign up to my newsletter, get simple tips for blah, blah, blah. Who is your audience for those things? Do you find that you're helping other writers with that sort of thing? Or are you helping people at the businesses who might be hiring you? How has that evolved?
Sarah Townsend: Yeah. Well, I would say my ideal audience is potential clients, but the audience in reality is quite often the freelancers and other writers. And I'm completely happy with that. I think ultimately as long as, for me, it's now about giving value back because I've had a successful freelance career for at least some of the 21 years that I've been freelance. And self employment has been good to me. It's been challenging and there have been big highs and lows, but I feel like I've got to a stage where I'm at a point where I need to perhaps reassess my own offering and perhaps do more mentorship and consulting, I guess, than just the words.
Sarah Townsend: So I think I have definitely had clients who have subscribed to my newsletter who have watched or read my posts for 18 months and then they've gone, "Oh, maybe you could write our website for us. We're doing a rebrand." Or, "Can you take a look at our marketing strategy?" So it works. I'm not at all bothered. In fact, I welcome other freelancers and other copywriters subscribing if it adds value and it helps them then yeah.
Steve Folland: Because, of course, you've also written this book, as you mentioned, so Survival Skills for Freelancers. So that's obviously not aimed at your clients.
Sarah Townsend: No, although some of my clients are self employed.
Steve Folland: Oh, okay. Fair enough, so how did that come about?
Sarah Townsend: Well, originally when my business turned 18, so I guess three years ago now, I put out in my newsletter funnily enough, what did everybody think that I should do to celebrate? And a few people said, "Oh, would you share the things that you've learned, the most important lessons that you've learned from 18 years of working for yourself?" And I thought, "Well, that's a great idea. I'll write a blog post." So I started it and I sat with it for freaking months and I could not nail those posts. I just kept coming back to it and going, "No, no, I can't do it." And I think I was just frozen in perfectionist angst because I was like, "How in the hell do you cram 18 years worth of text into a blog post? You just can't do it!" So finally, when I got to 20 years of my business, I don't know what happened, but I just got over myself and just decided it didn't need to be perfect.
Sarah Townsend: And actually if I could just summarize some of the things I've learned that would be good enough. So I put the good enough version of this blog post out there and people just responded so well to it. They literally were so grateful, I think, for the honesty and the reality of freelance life that people don't often don't talk about. So there's a lot out there about why you should work for yourself. You get to work how you like, when you like, where you like and for people that you like doing work that you love. But there's a lot more to it than that. And I don't think we help one another by putting this little rosy tinted sheen on self employment. It's much more helpful to share the reality and how to tackle the reality because then everybody knows what to do.
Sarah Townsend: Okay. Well, I should expect a bit of self doubt or I should expect unpredictable workloads and clients and income. And yeah, I think from the positive response I had it became far and away my most well received blog post. I just thought, "I've never wanted to write a book." I literally had a little bit in there that got lost in the book equivalent of the cutting room floor in the final edit, basically saying that I had never wanted to write a book. And everybody kept saying to me, "Oh, have you ever thought about writing a book?" I was like, "No, no." I don't know. I just got the idea in my head and when I've got an idea I am like a dog with a bone. I can't stop until I've achieved that thing, whatever that thing may be. So I get obsessed with the new thing and that's what the book became. It became the new thing. So I became obsessed with how I could do it as well as humanly possible.
Steve Folland: How long did it take you to end up turning that blog post into a book?
Sarah Townsend: Not very long. I'd say in total, maybe eight months start to finish, but the actual writing process... Well, I gave myself January off client work, which is quite a big deal really when you're self employed and obviously you have to have the luxury of having well, more of a necessity really when you're self employed. You have to have savings to fall back on to be able to do that because I've been a single mum for 13 years. So it was just my income coming in.
Sarah Townsend: So yeah, I thought, "Right, I can't focus on things until I finish this first draft." So I gave myself January to nail it and I'd already been working on it for a while at that point, maybe on and off for a while. But I thought, "No, it's just not working for me." I am just laser focused. I've just got a weird brain. I can't let things go. I literally can't let things go. So I have to finish them, like big time complete finisher. So yeah, I guess in total probably eight months from initial idea to launch, not very long, really.
Steve Folland: Wow. Well, it's a great book. We'll put a link of course @beingfreelance.com.
Sarah Townsend: Thank you. But then do you know what? People keep saying to me, "How many copies have you sold?" And I'm like, "I have no idea." And I don't care because for me, it's not about that. It's about helping as many freelancers as possible to accelerate their own success because 20 years is a damn long time to get to where I've got to. It shouldn't take that long. And it took that long because I was rubbish at the business bit. But I didn't have anything to read that was all the advice that I would have loved to have myself.
Steve Folland: Because a big part of the book, and I haven't finished it yet because when I saw that it might become the Book Club book, I thought, "Well, I'll stop reading it and then I can read it when I'm meant to read it." But just from reading the first bits of it, I can see that a large part of it is yeah, there's practical skills, like you say, with bank accounts and things, but also about the wellbeing, the mental health side of it. You mentioned, for example for yourself, you're feeling that isolation is probably one of the biggest challenges that you come up against. How have you coped? You work from home, right?
Sarah Townsend: I, well, I had during lockdown, that's for sure. But before lockdown, I was working at my gym, the lounge bar at my gym. That was my happy place because I'd get there in the morning about half past eight. I'd do a couple of hours work. I'd go off and do some form of exercise to clear my head and for my own mental health and wellbeing. And then I'd come back to work. And then I'd work for as long as my laptop battery allowed, which with a new shiny Mac is quite a long time. So I'd spent the vast majority of my working day at David Lloyd.
Steve Folland: Interesting, how long have you done that?
Sarah Townsend: A long time, maybe three years regularly. And it is for the bars. I just love the bars. I have headphones on. So I listen to music, but I like having people around me. I get energized by it. And I also find if I'm sitting in a public space, it keeps me more... When you're working at home there's always, "Oh my God, I should just go and hang the washing. I should just go and empty the dishwasher. I should probably clear up last night's dishes." And I actually, when I am working from home, I actually use those little breaks in my day to get up and to do some stretches and to move around. And while I'm sticking the kettle on I'll maybe stick a wash on. And that's great because that means that you don't finish your working day with a pile of chores lined up ready for you to do, especially being a single parent. But yeah, no, I love working out of the home, but I'm lucky enough to have a dedicated office. So that's nice too.
Steve Folland: I love the fact that you're not going to a cowork space and then taking time out of your day to go to a gym. You're going to a gym and then fueled by the smell of disinfectant and chlorine mixed with chocolate muffins, you set to work and you spend your time... They must have a nickname for you. Do you know what I mean? When you see a regular?
Sarah Townsend: Well, true, but I am not the only person who does it. There are so many of us, all self employed. There's a guy who used to be a professional footballer who I've become quite friendly with who is now a property developer. There is a guy, he is a Sky Sports broadcaster, who has interviewed me for his own podcast, purely through meeting at the gym. So it's actually a really good way to meet people. And yeah, when they get new people behind the bar who make the coffee and make my lunch every day, they always say, "Oh, this is Sarah. She is like part of the furniture." It's not the most flattering description, but it's very true.
Steve Folland: And how about then staying focused on the work nowadays, this is. Do you keep it to just the time when you're there at the gym? Does it seep out of that?
Sarah Townsend: Yeah, it definitely seeps out. So I am an early starter with work. I don't really like working into the evenings. I like my evenings to be chill out time. My daughter has left home and lives in Bristol now because she goes to uni there, but my son still spends half his time with me. So I didn't really like my work time to merge in with family time. That's really important to me. So yeah, I tend to start pretty early and finish usually a reasonable time, but sometimes it's as late as half six. But then I, in theory, don't work Friday since I turned 50, that was one of my big goals, that I was going to do different stuff, no client work on Fridays.
Steve Folland: So you made the decision not to work on Fridays. How do you keep that clear and what do you do with it?
Sarah Townsend: I like that to be my wellbeing time and my connecting with friends and people that I haven't seen for a long time. And then I will also do things like quite often I'll have chats with people that I would consider business friends. So quite often I'll have a coffee on a Friday afternoon on a Zoom call with somebody who I've got to know quite well. Like Jenny Stallard of Freelance Feels. She was one of my Friday coffees last week and we got on brilliantly and we shared tips to one another and just put the world to right really.
Sarah Townsend: And we'd talk about work, but not always about work. Before lock down I was meeting different friends for lunch. And I also make sure that I have any appointments. I really miss my things like reflexology and going to the chiropractor. And I have monthly shiatsu treatments to keep me balanced and they're just amazing for wellbeing and I've really missed all of that stuff. So that was a Friday thing for me. It was hair appointments and just a bit of self care because that's important.
Steve Folland: Yeah, that's good. We had Christian (Tait) on in this season as well. He then kept his Fridays. He was volunteering, but just like not work, doing something different.
Sarah Townsend: I think it's the way forward. Personally, I think you've got to tune into what works for you because I think everybody has different patterns. Some people prefer to start work late morning and work into the evening. Some people would prefer to take a break in the afternoon and go for a walk, walk the dog, go out for a bike ride, whatever. I've got colleagues/peers/friends. I never know what to call business friends, do you? Business buddies? I really don't know. But anyway, those people. I know a couple who are really into their mountain biking quite often start work early in the morning and then go for a bike ride in the afternoon. I think you've got to tune into what works for you.
Steve Folland: So obviously you've written the book, Survival Skills for Freelancers. Which out of all of those, because it's partly your experience, but you've also interviewed people and you've taken quotes from people-
Sarah Townsend: Including your good self.
Steve Folland: You didn't have to mention that. As you were putting it all together, what out of that, like maybe there's a couple of the survival skills as you call them, that you wish that you had started sooner?
Sarah Townsend: Yeah, it is a really difficult one to narrow down, but for me, I think the biggest one that I struggled with was asking for help. I've just always had this total fundamental inability to ask for help in all areas of my life. With my kids, when I was a single mom, when I was really struggling with juggling work and family life, I never really had any particularly practical support from my parents or my inlaws when I was still married. So always felt like I had to do everything myself. And then when you go freelance, you suddenly find you've got to do your own accounts, your own sales, your own marketing. You've got to be your own life coach doing all your own admin, emails, all this kind of thing. And actually it's just the fast train to burn out.
Sarah Townsend: Honestly, you need to accept, I think, the things that you really need help with and get into the mindset where actually asking for help, outsourcing to someone, often another freelancer. So you're doing a good thing by helping someone else in their business. But outsourcing the things that you're not good at, you don't enjoy and that don't make you money is a good sound economic business decision. Because the chances are, you can earn more in your day than it's going to cost you to pay somebody to do the things that you need help with. And even if you can't, it just frees you up to focus on the thing that you love doing, which is more often than not the reason why you went freelance in the first place. So I would say, yeah, if you're like me and you're a perfectionist control freak and you have a fundamental inability to ask for help, get over yourself. And the quicker you can get over yourself, the better because having a team of people on your side who are there to support your business is just such an empowering place to be.
Steve Folland: So who do you have now?
Sarah Townsend: This is not something I mentioned in the book, but I've had a cleaner for 20 years because honest to God, I couldn't have juggled being a mom and running a business and doing all the cleaning up. That's the number one essential. There's no way I'm ever having a cleaner go. So I have a cleaner. I have an accountant, somebody who helps me with my admin. I use various graphic designers for various things. So I've got somebody who does my web hosting, who does my tech support from a web perspective, a graphic designer who does a lot of my branding stuff and an IT company. That's a big one for me because I only pay them something like 26 pounds a month for a retainer for every single time my mat goes wrong or I'm struggling with something. I just fire them over an email or give them a call and they just hop on it, log in, fix it and job down. That's that's a game changer.
Steve Folland: Nice. Yeah, just the thought of being your own IT departments.
Sarah Townsend: I spend so much time faffing with printers and WiFi as it is. And those are things that they can't really support with. But honest to God, the bane of my freelance life, I swear, is WiFi and not being able to connect to my printer. Freelancer struggles!
Steve Folland: Sarah, thank you so much. All the best being freelance.
Sarah Townsend: It's been an absolute pleasure to chat to you, Steve. Thank you for inviting me on.