Digital Marketer Claire Gallagher
About this episode…
DIGITAL MARKETER CLAIRE GALLAGHER
When Claire moved from Ireland to France in 2009 she started picking up freelance work with the expat community.
Since then she’s been on an even bigger journey. From a designer of ‘everything’ to a niche digital marketer. From ‘having lots of work’ to ‘having a business’. From working into the early hours with no life, to working a four day week with two months off in the summer.
So much learned. Not just a new language.
Read the highlights in the next tab.
EXPAT COMMUNITIES
Claire’s from Ireland but it was her move to France in 2009 that sparked her move into freelancing. A lot of her first work came from the expats she met. She thinks, if you move away from your country, you need to become someone who goes out and networks…
“It was quite easy to tap into the expat network in France. Because as soon as you're an English speaker who can do design, everybody wants your number. As soon as you're an expat, as soon as you're not living in the country that you're from, you have to be the person who goes to things. You have to build up your network. There's lots of meetups. There's lots of like ex-pat groups. There's business networking and stuff like that. And as soon as you're an English speaker, that's already part of your niche - it's like English speaking business owners in Paris. So there's a lot of lovely support groups and networks. Just kind of tune into those. I met some fabulous people early on.”
WoRK LIFE UNBALANCED
Claire decided to go full-time freelance so she could be there for her young family. But she came to realise it wasn’t really working out…
“In a way, I was the victim of my own success. I had so much work on that I didn't have time for anything else in my life. Like, literally. I wasn't socialising. When I was with my son, I was checking emails, trying to post on social media for visibility, doing edits on people's websites when I was on holiday.
And there was just a moment when I was sitting at my kitchen table working and I looked at the clock and it was two o'clock in the morning. And I could hear the sleeping noises of my husband and children in the other room. And I just thought, what am I doing here? I'm missing out on life by just trying to keep people happy.
I realised that something had to change. I couldn't keep going on because everything in my life was suffering: relationships, health, everything.”
WORKING WITH A BUSINESS COACH
Eventually with the help of business coaches Claire turned her work and her work/life balance around. Don’t be afraid to get support from others.
“I started to work with coaches and mentors to help me to actually have a business rather than just having work. Cause there's a big difference there of just being busy all the time, working burning the midnight oil...
Every time I've worked with a coach, even the coaches that I didn't like, or that didn't suit me, they always got me somewhere. Every time I've worked with a coach or a mentor I've been able to implement or take action on something that I've been sitting on for maybe a year or six months.
I don't know if it's the fact that you're paying somebody to tell you what to do, or the fact that they're really supporting you. Unless you want to stay in the same place, I think you need other people to keep you accountable and to encourage you to take action that you would be afraid to do on your own.”
FOUR dAY WEEK - 10 MONTH YEAR
Claire’s now planned out her pricing and work to let her work less in order to be there for her family.
“I had to stop working weekends and after hours. So the work-life balance thing - from that moment of rock bottom, when I was working in the middle of the night and everybody was asleep, I made a promise to myself that I'd never go back there and remind myself that my little kids are only little for a very short time. So now I work four days a week and this summer I was able to take two months off.
So I've engineered it into how I work that I have to make my money in 10 months instead of 12. I have to take this time off because my kids in a couple of years might not want to hang out with me. So that's just my deal breaker. I need to prioritise the time off so that when I come back from that I'm fully refreshed and energised and I can do my best work with the people who are paying me.”
FINDING HER IDEAL CLIENTS
When Claire transitioned from doing everything from everyone to working with a specific group of people, she went out and spoke to them…
“I spent a lot of time trying to identify who my ideal client was... I interviewed a bunch of them and I asked them, where do you spend time online? And how do you seek to solve this problem? By interviewing those people, they were literally telling me where to come and find more of them.
A lot of business coaches and courses, they'll say 'ideal client avatar', and it's a completely fictional made up thing that's from your imagination. But when you actually meet real, three-dimensional human people with a heartbeat and problems and questions, they will literally tell you everything you need to know about how to find them, how to speak to them, how to inspire them…”
TIME IS TICKING
Part of working efficiently for Claire is keeping an eye on the time. Unlike many freelancers she doesn’t track her time (“That’s like calorie counting! Horrible.”) but she literally hear it ticking…
“I've got one of those little timers, you know, when you turn the dial, it's red and you can see the time ticking. You can call it the Pomodoro method as well - you set your task for 20 minutes or something. But it's from being very protective of my time. You know, you can scroll for hours, you can Google something and go down a rabbit hole. And if you put your timer on and it beeps, it kind of brings you back to the real world because you can infinitely scroll and things can get lost.
When a task is important, I'll dedicate a certain amount of time for it and if it goes over that's okay. But your day can kind of slip away. If you have a ton of stuff to do, having a little timer keeps you accountable for the minutes in your day.”
“We should always listen more than we speak…
You've got to listen to your clients, you've got to listen to feedback, you've got to hear it in order to make changes, make improvements, and actually be really good at your job. Listening is key.”
Claire Gallagher, Digital Marketer
More from CLAIRE GALLAGHER
Transcript of the Being Freelance podcast with Steve Folland and Freelance Digital Marketer Claire Gallagher
Steve Folland:
As ever, how about we get started hearing how you got started being freelance?
Claire Gallagher:
Well, I live in France, but I'm from Ireland. When I moved to France, my French was rubbish. So I kind of officially got started being freelance when I moved to France in 2009. When I came to France, first, I carried on working with a lot of people that I had worked with back in Ireland. And then we started our family and I figured, you know, the world of work isn't always a very nice place to mums and dads - a lot of eye-rolling happens when you have to leave to pick up a kid or, or something. So I figured I want my first priority to always be the little ones. So I decided to go it alone.
Steve Folland:
When you moved to France, you carried on working remotely with people in Ireland, as in you weren't freelance?
Claire Gallagher:
I had always worked in agencies before, so design agencies, communications agencies, and I traveled quite a lot with it. So I'd been in London, Melbourne, and I had like a great experience. It's very easy to just jump in and get a job somewhere as a freelance graphic designer. But when I was in Ireland, it was a lovely big agency that I worked with. And they kept sending me bits of work as I was in Paris and a few other people that I knew gave me odds and ends. And then when I took it properly full-time, when I wasn't working in agencies anymore, in Paris, I just went for it and started doing the whole networking thing, set up my own website.
Claire Gallagher:
And, you know, it was quite easy to tap into the ex-pat network in France. Because as soon as you're an English speaker who can do design, everybody wants your number. As soon as you're an ex-pat, as soon as you're not living in the country that you're from, you have to be the person who goes to things. You have to build up your network. There's lots of meetups. There's lots of like ex-pat groups. There's business networking and stuff like that. And as soon as you're an English speaker, that's already part of your niche - it's like English speaking, business owners in Paris. So there's a lot of lovely support groups and networks there. And you can just kind of tune into those. And I met some fabulous people early on.
Steve Folland:
And what were you positioning yourself as?
Claire Gallagher:
I was an everything graphic designer, because I'd worked in agencies before, and as you come up as a junior, you kind of have to know how to do everything. When I went freelance first, I was just like, 'you want a design? I can make it. You want a logo? I can make it. You want a flyer? You want a website? I can make it.' So in the beginning, I had the software and I knew how to use it. So I pretty much was doing anything and everything. And it was just over time, I realised what I'm actually really good at, and what I'm most interested in is the strategy part of it and putting those systems in place so that people can have their own business. So in the beginning it was whatever you want done. I can do it. And then I kind of fine tuned it over time.
Steve Folland:
And this is over about 12 years?
Claire Gallagher:
Yeah. My French should be better by now (laughing).
Steve Folland:
When would you say it felt like you knew that? When did you stop doing everything?
Claire Gallagher:
That was a rock bottom moment, not rock bottom, but... I was able to get projects quite easily because of these networks and everybody was so kind to refer me and pass my name onto other people. And it was after I'd had my son and I was in a way the victim of my own success, because I had so much work on that I didn't have time for anything else in my life. Like, literally. I wasn't socialising. When I was with my son, I was checking emails, trying to post on social media for visibility, doing edits on people's websites when I was on holidays. And there was just a moment when I was sitting at my kitchen table. I remember it so clearly. I had to add something to one of my client's webpages and I didn't know what image to use and what textthey wanted there.
Claire Gallagher:
And I looked at the clock and it was two o'clock in the morning. And I could hear the sleeping noises of my husband and children in the other room. And I just thought, what am I doing here? I'm missing out on life by just trying to keep people happy. And I realised, I couldn't email these people at two o'clock in the morning - they'd think I was crazy! So from that point on, I started to work with coaches and mentors to just really help me to actually have a business rather than just having work. Cause there's a big difference there of just being busy all the time, working burning the midnight oil... And it wasn't even a high income either. It was just working all the time with no perspective. So it was a very distinct moment in the middle of the night and I realised that something had to change. And I really, I couldn't keep going on because everything in my life was suffering: relationships, health, everything.
Steve Folland:
So what did you do?
Claire Gallagher:
I think it took me a while still to accept help after that. I think like creatives, creative problem solvers, we like to figure it out. We like to find the edges of what we can do, and if we can't do something, we learn how to do it. So at that point I started buying courses and sure, I didn't have any time and then I was spending more time on the courses. But over time, I met a friend of mine who was also an independent creative, and she recommended a business coach to me. And I worked with that business coach. And then I worked with another business coach and I got much clearer on what my most valuable contribution is.
Claire Gallagher:
And I got much clearer on what my actual priorities were and it was supposed to be my family, but I was spending every hour of the day and night working. And so it put it back in perspective what my priorities were. I think coaches are very good at holding a mirror up to you and saying things like, well, didn't you do this for this reason? Are you doing that? So from one coach to the next, from one course to the next, it just started getting better and better over time.
Steve Folland:
What would you say were the main things that you then did to go from having work to having a business as you put it?
Claire Gallagher:
It was just being much more specific about what I do and who I serve and what value I can bring. It was just about getting really, really clear that the work that I did for people would help them to get clients. Whereas previously it was just, I can do brochures, I can do logos, I can do websites - but I focused in on the deliverable of my service and that was 'work with me and we will create something that will help you to get clients'. So I work a lot with coaches and consultants and other creatives now. As well as helping them to create something that will get them clients and avoid all the mistakes that I made in the early days of working every hour of the night. So I got super, super clear on the value that I was offering and not just doing anything and everything.
Steve Folland:
And did that mean that you did different work? What did you start doing then?
Claire Gallagher:
I started getting more specific about saying that I was creating websites, but anybody who's ever created a website knows that creating a website, isn't just creating a website, it's writing text, doing layouts, creating brand kits and finding out a way of driving traffic to that website. So I created a kind of a system, like a process that created a website that was more meaningful. So my deliverable was a website, but the actual process was very, very key to it because it's working on messaging and positioning and working on their ideal client and really branding their services and everything. So it was packaged up as a website, but in that it was creating the content of that website and creating the look and feel of that website as a holistic process, for want of a better word.
Steve Folland:
As you transitioned from doing everything to doing that, what happened? Did work go quiet for a bit, or did it just go seamlessly from one thing to another?
Claire Gallagher:
Well, the dream would be for it to go seamlessly from one thing to the next, but it was interesting in a way... As a freelancer, the first time saying 'no' to work. I was still getting people emailing me and I was still meeting people and they were asking for a flyer and a brochure and things like that. And I had to start saying no to it, which was so scary, because if you have nothing else in the pipeline, and you're saying no to people offering you money, it was like, what am I doing?! But having a coach at my back and actually having a mastermind group - by the time I was really starting to make big changes I was part of a mastermind, which was hugely helpful - of just people saying, 'Nope, you have set your vision. You know what you want. You have to say no to this.'.
Claire Gallagher:
So yes, there was a lull - but it really did pay off. In preparing for that kind of transition, I created a little runway of money. I know you guys talk about that a lot on this podcast and your Doing It For The Kids podcast - and it's to have some kind of buffer or runway before you make any big changes. And that was important because it took a while to really get known for the other thing, rather than just getting known for the person you can call whenever you need anything. So to build a reputation it took a little while.
Steve Folland:
And where did you get those new clients with the work that you wanted to be doing?
Claire Gallagher:
That was interesting because I had been doing this work with other people. So anytime I was doing random graphic design stuff, my question was always, well, who is this for? Who is your ideal client here? And what are they interested in? So I was always kind of tuned into the importance of, well, who is this for? So I spent a lot of time trying to identify who my ideal client was and interviewing people and asking people, the people who I would identify as my ideal client, like the people with whom I could do my best work and they could pay for it. I interviewed a bunch of them and I asked them, where do you spend time online? And how do you seek to solve this problem? By interviewing those people, they were literally telling me where to come and find more of them.
Claire Gallagher:
I think a lot of it was just network as well. And referrals. I had already established something of an email list at that stage, and I was talking to people about that, but definitely network was the first thing. And then I experimented with just showing up in Facebook groups and being helpful and offering to brainstorm with people and just kind of building a reputation that way within certain communities. And then after that, the ball got rolling and I started to experiment with other ways of finding clients, like doing webinars, doing events, doing YouTube stuff, doing blogging. So it kind of all built up, one thing on top of another after a while, but initially network, you can't go wrong with reaching people in your own community.
Steve Folland:
You say you were interviewing people. Literally? What did you do?
Claire Gallagher:
Have you heard of the design sprint? Anybody who's worked in IT, or development, they'll be familiar with the term 'sprint' because it's like a micro project that has a very strict deadline. But there's a book called Sprint by this guy called Jake Knapp and it's all about a process of designing a project. And one of the parts of this is interviewing people and asking them, well, how do you think of it? So this always inspired me to actually, instead of questionnaires and surveys, to get on calls with people, to have coffee with people and ask them specific questions around how they seek a service like mine. So it's all a bit meta because this is the kind of work that I do now with my own clients, but interviewing people, the people who would be your ideal clients, so a potential perfect client, whatever way you want to call it - actual human beings.
Claire Gallagher:
Because a lot of these kind of business coaches and courses, they'll say 'ideal client avatar', and it's a completely fictional made up thing that's from your imagination. But when you actually meet real, three-dimensional human people with a heartbeat and problems and questions, they will literally tell you everything you need to know about how to find them, how to speak to them, how to inspire them. And so I would interview people and ask them, well where do you like to hang out online? And what have you Googled recently in relation to a service like mine - very specific questions like that. Instead of trying to guess, or get creative about inventing it or following some online guru's 'indestructable plan to blah, blah, blah'. It gets a bit tiresome after a while - all of that online kind of content. When you connect with the real people, you can't go wrong because they literally tell you everything you need to know about how to find them and connect with them.
Steve Folland:
And so as this plan of yours started to work, did it work in the way that you hoped work-life balance wise as well?
Claire Gallagher:
Yes. Now this was the huge deal breaker for me. I had to stop working weekends and after hours. So the work-life balance thing - from that moment of rock bottom, when I was working in the middle of the night and everybody was asleep, I made a promise to myself that I'd never go back there and remind myself that my little kids are only little for a very short time. So now I work four days a week and this summer I was able to take two months off. So I've designed that into how I work because July and August here, I don't know if you've ever been to the South of France, but July and August, it gets really hot.
Claire Gallagher:
It gets bloody hot, and nobody wants to have their consultant sweating on the call. So I've kind of engineered it into how I work that I have to make my money in 10 months instead of 12. I have to take this time off because my kids in a couple of years might not want to hang out with me. So that's just my deal breaker. I need to prioritise the time off so that when I come back from that I'm fully refreshed and energised and I can do my best work with the people who are paying me,
Steve Folland:
Which sounds amazing. Is amazing. Two months off and a four day week. But how do you actually manage to make that happen?
Claire Gallagher:
Some of it comes down to pricing - as in the service that I offer. I price it in a way that I don't need a million clients in order to make the money that I need to make. I'm not saying like I deserve to be paid loads of money, but I it's value based pricing. The people who come and work with me, they are investing in a service that's going to help them make money. So my service is priced accordingly. So I'm able to charge the amount of money, which means that I don't have to work with a bazillion clients all the time, which means if I don't have to work with all of those clients, it means I have more time basically. So it comes down to pricing and also how my process works. I have a very step-by-step process that I bring people through. Every single client that goes through it, it always looks different, but it's a process that helps me get all of the important information so that we can create a strategy that's really relevant and meaningful for their business. So, yeah, pricing and being able to work very efficiently, in a powerful way for the people who you invest and trust me with their marketing.
Steve Folland:
And does that mean that you maybe only work with one client at a time?
Claire Gallagher:
No, it's more like it's similar to like a coaching model in that we meet for an hour each week, depending on what deadlines they have, but it can be that we do it as a sprint, which means we're meeting every day for a week or a week and a half sometimes, or we're meeting once a week for three months. That's also the thing that was always been a pet peeve of mine in agencies. You know, the designers are locked away in a little room and they're not allowed to talk to anybody, but when you actually go and meet the client, I mean, maybe I'm laboring this a little bit, but meeting the client is very important. When I worked in agencies as a designer, unless you're like a senior or an art director, you don't always get to meet the clients. So being able to work with them directly in real time, face to face, you just get to the juicy stuff quicker, rather than exchanging emails and filling out surveys and templates and things like that. Great human connection is so much more important.
Steve Folland:
And as you moved into this new way of working, what did you do with your own website with your own portfolio?
Claire Gallagher:
Oh, yeah. The poor old portfolio, always three years behind. So you're supposed to show and not tell. But I think it needs to be a combination of showing and telling for a website to work well and to convince people of your skills. So I'm still doing design and layouts and things like that with my clients. And I communicat it as always like a results based project. So we create something that is designed to get results. So that's what I try and show in my portfolio. And even in the content that I create, like for my blog and for wherever I show up online, it's like to talk about the process of identifying what you need to do, and then doing that rather than doing the things that you're supposed to be doing, like a full website and your about page and all this kind of stuff. So the designer and the artist's website and portfolio is always a work in progress. And I use my own website as an experimental testing ground for other strategies. So I know how they work so that I can do them with my clients. So it's always evolving.
Steve Folland:
You say 'show and tell'. Do you like have case studies where you work through your process?
Claire Gallagher:
Sometimes when I do get to write the case studies properly,I write up the description of, 'well, when Mary came to me, we had this idea in mind, we explored X, Y, Z. And then this is what we did in the step-by-step... Now that doesn't always happen because those take ages to write and people sometimes take a while to get back with their testimonials. So I sometimes do snapshots as well to just have the visual and the context of it. So it means I can spend 20 minutes doing a portfolio piece instead of four hours. But in the show and tell, I'd say why this person got in touch with me in the first place, what they wanted to achieve, what their real vision was. And then I'll detail the steps that we took in order to kind of have a results driven process or a project.
Steve Folland:
You call them 'project stories', not 'case studies' right?
Claire Gallagher:
Well, that's essentially what they are, but nobody jumped out of bed in the morning to read a case study.
Steve Folland:
You mentioned having an email list earlier, but on your site, you have a freebie if they sign up?
Claire Gallagher:
Well, as I just said, my site is the testing ground, so I've been testing a bunch of stuff recently, because I believe that eBooks don't work. I believe that any content that takes more than half an hour to consume or understand just doesn't work. So I've been testing out a certain worksheet. So there's a blog post of mine that because I'm tuned into how my website performs. I got Google console and I can see what people are Googling to get to my site. And which blog posts or which pages is the most popular. So I noticed that this one blog post that I'd written ages ago, it just had like 10 times more traffic than anything else. So I created a freebie to go with it.
Claire Gallagher:
It was called 'the web strategy template'. So people had been Googling that exact term. So I made a web strategy template, and that is by far the most effective opt-in incentive that I've ever created. But it's only on that one blog post. Across the whole rest of my website, I test other things. So I have live workshops, cheat sheets, E-books all of these kinds of things. eBooks never work. Nobody has died for an ebook. But I'm always testing. It changes any time I want to prove to myself that a certain piece of content works or doesn't work. I change it up to see what happens. So people don't want a replay of a webinar. People don't want a one hour training - worksheets and cheat sheets work like nothing else. If it's a quick win, if it's a quick turnaround time, people are way more interested.
Steve Folland:
That's so cool. Speaking of which, and presumably you will know how this works for you because you look at your metrics - some of your stuff might not feature your face, but a lot of it does.
Claire Gallagher:
I was not comfortable at first. It too me a long time. I actually have a podcast with a friend of mine who is a personal brand photographer. And she said, come on Claire, you need to show your face. Because previously I was just showing my work. I was just showing pictures like snapshots of logos and websites that I'd made. But also one of the coaches that I was working with, she says, you can have the nicest logo in the world, but people are going to remember your face way more quickly than anything else. So she said, if you want to build up your personal brand, you have to show your face. And then I've been doing that ever since. It's not easy, especially when you hit 40.
Steve Folland:
So you find it works
Claire Gallagher:
Yeah. I've even been recognised a couple of times.
Steve Folland:
And you said about showing up online - where do you show up?
Claire Gallagher:
Well, I play on Instagram. For me anyway and my temperament as how I can show up online. I mean, I don't love the labels of introvert/extrovert because I think you can corner yourself with things, but I'm not somebody who has eternal energy to show up online. And my temperament and my energy for marketing myself, because my face is on so many things, it kind of ebbs and flows. So sometimes I have a load of energy and I'll do a bunch of reels on Instagram, or sometimes I have a load of energy and I'll do a load of videos for YouTube, but it ebbs and flows. So for me personally, now this isn't what I say to my clients and it's not prescriptive for people that I work with, but for me, people find out about me and then they go to Instagram to see, well, what's this chick all about?
Claire Gallagher:
YouTube - I feel safer there because there's less family and friends watching. So in terms of how I show up online, it's mostly on Instagram in terms of, you know, me talking and expressing my opinion. I kind of edged away from Facebook quite a lot, especially during the lockdown periods, I thought there was too much happening there. So I kind of leaned away from Facebook, even though that was what helped my business in the very early days, but showing up online - sometimes I have a load of energy for it. And then sometimes I give myself permission to take a break from it as well, which I think is important for my mental health.
Steve Folland:
And what about your podcast? How did that come about?
Claire Gallagher:
So she's been a friend of mine since we were about 18. She's the personal brand photographer that told me to show my face. And we just always had these great chats. We always had these kind of conversations that were about business, but also about your personality and your vision and all those kinds of things. So we said everybody's making a podcast. Why shouldn't we as well? And strangely people are listening. It's fantastic. It means I get to talk to my friend every week, which is really nice 'cause you know, life can get in the way and you just don't talk to your chums as much. So we had to be quite structured because we both have kids and we're both quite busy with work. So we schedule in our chat and then we take turns in editing it and then we both share with our own audiences and it's been nice.
Claire Gallagher:
Another design sprint thing: I put a little timer on. So I allow myself a certain amount of time to work on it. I allow myself a certain amount of time to promote it .But it's been fab. It means I get to talk to my friend every week and talk about topics that my non-business owner friends would not go near in terms of like chit-chat, but it means we get into these lovely deep conversations and people email us all the time to say how much they got out of it and everything.
Steve Folland:
And so that gives you yet more stuff to talk about, more visibility. Do you think it brings you work?
Claire Gallagher:
It allows people to get to know us. It allows people to hear what kind of person you are . The way that I work with people as well is very, one-on-one, it's a very kind of close relationship. And even sometimes just getting on a call with somebody online, you're like, well, who is this person? And what are they all about? If they hear your voice and they hear you have a laugh with your friend, but also having quite serious conversations. There's a trust factor there. So I don't think it's visibility wise. I don't think it's the thing that is going to get us found, but there's a little edging towards a relationship, a trusting relationship when they get a sense of who you are by listening to you.
Steve Folland:
I'm intrigued though. You said about setting a timer. Are you literally setting a timer?
Claire Gallagher:
Yeah. I've got one of those little time timers, you know, when you turn the dial, it's red and you can see the time ticking. I mean you can call it the Pomodoro method as well - you set your task for 20 minutes or something. But again, it's from being very protective of my time. You know, you can scroll for hours, you can Google something and go down a rabbit hole. And if you put your timer on and it beeps, it kind of brings you back to the real world because you can infinitely scroll and things can get lost.
Steve Folland:
Do you do that with everything?
Claire Gallagher:
I'm a bit of a geek for that. When a task is important, I'll dedicate a certain amount of time for it and if it goes over that's okay. But your day can kind of slip away. If you have a ton of stuff to do, having a little timer, it just kind of keeps you accountable for the minutes in your day.
Steve Folland:
Do you track your time?
Claire Gallagher:
So I tried that so many times and it was like calorie counting. It's horrible. I cannot track my time. I can set myself a task to do a thing in 20 minutes, 45 minutes, two hours, but having to track it? Oh no, it gives me a pain in the stomach.
Steve Folland:
You obviously have this value based pricing. How do you deal with people who can't afford you?
Claire Gallagher:
That's a really good question. Sometimes they just can't afford me and that's it and I'll try and give them some advice and point them to some resources. And based on my advice and the resources that I sent them to maybe in a couple of months, they will have the money. But generally I try and position my offering as results-based. As a result of the work that we do, ideally they'll be getting clients off it. So it's a return on investment that can turn around in a couple of months. I'm not one of these kind of hard sales people though. People don't want to spend the money? I totally respect that.
Steve Folland:
So you wouldn't adjust the scope. You point them to resources and hope they come back.
Claire Gallagher:
Well, you can always hope that they come back, but you can also send them an email and ask them, how's it going?! There's a lot of mindset stuff in it as well. We can get in our own way quite a lot saying, well, I can't start a podcast or who am I to say, I can offer this result. There's a lot of imposter syndrome there and there's a lot of fear of people's judgment. So there's a lot of mindset stuff in there. Some people will come to me and they say, I couldn't come out and make that statement online. And I question them. Well, why couldn't you make that statement online?
Claire Gallagher:
This is what you studied for five years to do. And, and things like that. So sometimes there's a little bit of fear and lack of confidence around. So sometimes I just need to nudge people in the direction - you don't have to feel confident about it, you just have to have an experimental, playful mindset about things and give it a go and keep showing up. And if it feels it's not working, just push through a little bit and keep going until you either know for sure that people don't want what you have or, you know, for sure that people do. Just be playful about it and maybe don't invest too heavily if it's not the right time for you in terms of your budget, just play with it.
Steve Folland:
You mentioned the importance of coaches, masterminds, etc. How did you find your coach and how did you know that they'd be good to work with?
Claire Gallagher:
Well, how to find coaches? They'll find you for sure. But sometimes you see somebody on social media. Sometimes it's a friend who's worked with them or you know, that kind of classic thing. You click on an ad, you attend a webinar, you get sucked into their mailing list and it sounds good to you. And then you get on a call and they're good at selling. So you end up being coached by them. I got sucked into a couple of coaching programs that were not suited to my temperament, that's for sure. And they came from personal recommendations and from social media ads and webinars and stuff. And sometimes it's not a right fit. And you just have to learn that expensive mistake. And sometimes it just works - like my most recent mentor. She's been fantastic. She's been brilliant. She's really supportive.
Steve Folland:
You've you've had quite a few coaches or mentors. Is that because of different stages of your business that you're in?
Claire Gallagher:
Every time I've worked with a coach, even the coaches that I didn't like, or that didn't suit me, they always got me somewhere. So if you're staying inside your comfort zone - and I'm not saying push outside of your comfort zone because you've got to look after yourself as well - but sometimes you just need somebody to say, 'go on then off you go, try this'. Every time I've worked with a coach or a mentor I've been able to implement or take action on something that I've been sitting on for maybe a year or six months. I don't know if it's the fact that you're paying somebody to tell you what to do, or the fact that they're really supporting you. Unless you want to stay in the same place,I think you need other people to keep you accountable and to encourage you to take action that you would be afraid to do on your own.
Steve Folland:
If you could tell your younger self, one thing about being freelance, what would that be?
Claire Gallagher:
I had so many things because young, young, freelance Claire, hadn't a clue. But one thing that definitely has served me very well is listening. There's a quote from a philosopher called Zeno: we have two ears and one mouth for a reason - we should always listen more than we speak. And I think that's really useful because you've got to listen to your clients, you've got to listen to feedback, you've got to hear it in order to make changes, make improvements, and actually be really good at your job. I think listening is key.
Steve Folland:
Nice. Claire, it's been an absolute joy chatting to you and all the best being freelance!