PR Lucy Werner
About this episode…
PR LUCY WERNER
From starting as a PR freelancer to accidentally heading a small agency, working with her husband and then transitioning back into solo freelancing, Lucy shares the challenges she's faced along the way.
As the creator of ‘Hype Yourself’, we hear how showing up daily even in her darkest days has built Lucy’s reputation. But maybe she wouldn’t quite do it all the same again. This episode is practical, fun, candid. And very much worth the hype.
Read the highlights in the next tab.
LOVE OR MONEY
Lucy had a vision of what she’d love to create with her business, but when clients keep coming with money, it can be hard to prioritise.
“I think a lot of freelancers have this.
We have the work that we do for love and we have the work that we do for money.And you need the money to be able to do the work for love. But if you take on too much money work, there's no time to do the love work. And it was this constant juggle.”
SELF PROMOTION
As freelancers, we’re small businesses, but we might think ‘PR’ isn’t for us, that it’s just sending out a press release. Maybe PR needs a makeover…
“Every decision we make in our business when we're talking externally is PR and I consider that to be more like ‘self promotion’ as an accessible word to people, because they think of PR as literally just getting into a newspaper.
Whereas if I say to you, I'm going to help you with your self promotion. They're like, Oh, okay. So I'm going to be like, promoting myself? Yes, that's ultimately what we are doing - we're using your profile to connect with other people, to connect to your audience so they go, I really like that person. Maybe I want to work with them.”
LUCY’s PUBLIC ALTER-EGO
Think Lucy’s confident and natural when you see her showing up? That doesn’t mean she doesn’t get nervous…
“There's an element to how I promote myself, like on my Instagram or when I'm public speaking, I liken to my drag queen alter ego. It's still me, but it's just a more confident, badass version of myself.
This kind of vibrant, brightly coloured, funnier, all singing, all dancing version of myself on the stage.”
PAY ATTENTION TO WHO YOU PAY ATTENTION TO
It’s taken years for Lucy to get her business to where she possibly wanted it to be all along.
“I would tell my younger self to really pay attention to who you take business advice from.
Because I got so distracted by what other people were doing and what other people told me to do.
I kept losing sight of what it was that I wanted to do”
MARKETING IN A WAY THAT FEELS RIGHT FOR YOU
Lucy knows she could probably make more sales of her products/courses etc if she followed online business techniques, but ultimately she’d rather do what feels right for her…
“If I was more organised, maybe I would have a quiz on my website and then an email marketing funnel system.
And it would tell people you need to buy this. And it would send them three or four emails to chase them into doing it. That’s not for me. It's just not my personality… It's not a system that feels comfortable for me.
It's like wearing a suit. I know it would make me look more professional.
I don't want to wear it.”
STEP BACK WHEN YOU NEED TO
Lucy has become visible by showing up consistently. Even when her second child was in hospital, when behind the scenes she was ‘crumbling’ she was still showing up. These days she realises it’s okay to step back, we’ll all be waiting for you, it’s okay…
“My darkest days, I always showed up. Every day. But now I know more to not do that.
Step back. And you know what? When you step back, it feels like eternity. If you take a month or two months, six months for you, it feels like you've been off for ages. Most people don't notice.
They really don't. We feel this need to come back on and make excuses. ‘I'm back now’. No one cares.”
More from LUCY WERNER
HypeYourself.com
Lucy’s Hype Yourself Substack
Hype Yourself book
More from Steve Folland
Transcript of the Being Freelance podcast with Steve Folland and PR Lucy Werner
Steve Folland: As ever, how about we get started hearing how you got started being freelance?
Lucy Werner: I really had my feet under the desk for a long time in corporate PR. I guess I'd worked for lots of agencies and it was sort of around about that time I kept meeting really cool entrepreneurs who couldn't afford big agency fees.
And I was just making lots of money for my company and watching my boss buy more and more expensive clothes and fund his extracurricular activities and thought actually, you know, I want to have a go at picking the clients I want to work with. At that time I was doing cigarettes, booze, gambling, you know, all the good stuff, and I thought, I don't know, I kind of just want to champion the underdogs for a bit and get them out there.
So that was the decision to leave. And I had three months kind of rent in my bank account. I thought you've got three months to make it. And so that was it. I just jumped off. First client was like a friend of a friend and then word of mouth spread and by month three I actually had an assistant and by the end of that first year I had a team of eight.
Steve Folland: Whoa! That escalated quickly.
Lucy Werner: Yeah, it really did escalate quickly.
Steve Folland: When was this?
Lucy Werner: This is 2014 into 2015.
Steve Folland: At what point did you realize that you needed an assistant or to get more people?
Lucy Werner: It wasn't a conscious decision. I remember a friend of mine saying, Oh, you're going to need an office for when you get a team.
And I was like, I will never get a team. And then at that time I had a bit of a niche of doing restaurant and food pop ups and experiential stuff in London. And I guess because we were a lot cheaper than most of the London agencies and we were doing a good job, we kept attracting a lot of those types of audiences.
So I think I had a pop up launch happening and I was like, I need another person. So it started off as a kind of part time freelancer helping me out. And I resisted payroll for as long as I kind of legally could on a project by project basis. But it got to the point where there were retainers rather than just projects.
And so I was going to have to get the pay, PAYE, slip out.
Steve Folland: And did you get an office?
Lucy Werner: I did. I started off renting a desk in exchange for PR in an innovation consultancy, which is where I met Adrienne, the co founder of my children.
And then there was London Met University - basically had office spaces above where they had lots of startups. And so I was on campus, so I could get the cheap dinners. I mean, that's not why I was there.That was a good by-product of that location. So yeah, I was kind of on a university campus with other startup businesses.
Steve Folland: But you suddenly find yourself accidentally building a team. Yeah. Did you know what you were doing, like pricing wise, business wise?
Lucy Werner: So in agency land, they do kind of train you as you move up on how to price your clients. So I kind of knew each level has an hourly rate. So I needed to kind of break down, if this is the fee, how many hours do I need of the team? Okay. That costs this much.
So I did kind of know pricing. I think what I didn't really realize is obviously you then need to put overheads and office and everything else on top of that. So later on, I think one of my old bosses told me actually the staff fee should only be like 40 percent of the fee because you need space for profit and then all of your other expenses.
Whereas I was kind of like using all of that fee for staff expenses. Not really taking into account tax and all those other things. And equally, I was only trained into running PR campaigns, not a business. So I was a terrible boss, a terrible leader. And really, I just wanted to do the work. I didn't want to be an agency owner. I just wanted to make PR affordable.
Steve Folland: So 2015 into 2016, how did things start to change?
Lucy Werner: It kind of had the momentum. So we just sort of kept on going. We had lots of people on retainer and then I got pregnant. And actually there was a kind of natural I guess shedding of a few staff and a few clients at that time.Things coming to an end.
So I had a kind of core team then probably of about three to four that I had full time and that first maternity leave Adrienne, the co founder of my children, then he worked for a big US company and he got shared parental leave at basically 90 percent of his salary paid. So I took the first three months and then we went traveling around France when the baby was four months till seven months with him off fully and me doing two days a week remotely in the UK with my team.
And then the day... I knew I was coming back to the office like the months before, so that was Christmas. I knew I was coming back to the office in January because I'd lined up child care from when the first baby was six months. And lots of things that were supposed to sign on didn't sign on.
Lots of people finished because it was the end of the year. And I was looking, I normally work three to six months ahead and I could see the pipeline. And there wasn't enough to keep the whole team going. And I also realized I didn't want to be in the office full time, but the team needed me there, they needed me there more than two days a week to keep them going, but when you're the only person bringing in new business, that's almost a full time job.
Urgh, it was horrid actually, I had to make the team redundant and I found one client I gave to the most senior member and she still works for them today, six years on. Um, one, I helped get into a full time placement and another one, they were a junior and they did a complete career pivot. Making people redundant is awful.
And then I decided. Actually, I've been doing PR, like I've been trained to do PR in an agency land. And actually, I didn't want clients all year round. I found it to be a really ineffective model. And I wanted to work on projects rather than retainers, which everybody tells you not to do. The business advice is always like get retainers, keep them.
But I actually find like to keep fresh and keep creative and to give value, I'd rather do... an expensive project for three months than have maybe somebody on a lower retainer for 12 months. So I started doing project by projects two days a week. And actually I was doing quite a lot at that time for mother, the ad agency had a startup arm of the business.
So I was supporting a lot of their startup projects that were maybe too small for their PR agency. And just doing kind of two days a week on them
Steve Folland: And what year, just, just to keep us on track, what year were you coming back from maternity?
Lucy Werner: I had the baby, so we're moving into 2018. And then I got pregnant again. Um, and that was when I was writing my book, Hype Yourself. And I knew when I wrote Hype Yourself, I wanted to pivot into raising my own profile because at that point, nobody on Instagram or Facebook knew who I was, it was literally an area of East London that knew me offline, but I wanted to have more of an online presence and be able to do more teaching and speaking and teach workshops.
And I kind of wanted to just help more people who had less budget essentially. So I knew I needed to scale in a different way. So I spent that kind of second pregnancy trying to build my profile, practicing teaching for free, practicing speaking for free, going to loads of events.
I shared a piece of advice every day on Instagram for a year as part of that profile building piece. And then that book was kind of going to be the gateway to me pivoting into the teaching.
The day I got the book deal, Adrienne got made redundant.
And so I was like, right, you're not going to qualify for paternity leave if you go anywhere else, you come on and you can have like a branding side to the business because people were seeing my Instagram and my website and wanting the same thing. So I was kind of using myself as the case study for his design work.
And we launched our first product together, which was the 52 PR tips, which you very kindly shared a few times in your Christmas gift guides
So this was 2019. And I used those gift cards - instead of sending like a press release out to be like, ‘you know, my husband's joined the business or, Hey, now we do branding’
I was like, I've made a product and my husband helped design it. He does design. He also did my website and he does my Instagram and he does my brochures and does anybody else need design? And that's kind of how we launched his side of the business.
Steve Folland: What I hadn't mentioned is the fact that your business was called The Wern. Was it that from the beginning?
Lucy Werner: Yeah, you know what, only because... Some people in PR and some of my friends have always just called me Wern. It was just Wern, that was just my name and I needed to register a name on Company's House, so I just went with The Wern because I was like, I can't call it Wern, but The Wern sounds so much more pro and then it just, that was it.
I didn't necessarily want it to be a lucywerner.com and actually if I could go back and redo it all again I definitely would have given it a better name.
Steve Folland: So 2019 suddenly the two of you working in business together - was it just the two of you?
Lucy Werner: We had freelancers that we were scaling projects with on and off.
But actually child number two came and was born with four rare congenital heart defects, which was a real spanner in the works. I'm not going to lie. Um, not that fun. And in my head, I was going to spend the maternity leave at home under a blanket, breastfeeding. It's all going to be easy and beautiful. And I was going to write my online courses and all my content to go with my book whilst also doing the PR for Adrienne launching his side of the business.
Instead of which we spent seven months going in and out of hospital. So actually there was a time where, particularly in that time, I felt very ashamed that I'd lost the full time team.
I felt really embarrassed about it. And I felt embarrassed that I hadn't got as many clients for Adrienne as I had intended to. And he actually white labeled for a time and did some design work for other agencies in town. So we were effectively both kind of operating as freelancers under this agency name.
And I joked before we recorded today, I had a very kind of poly amorous relationship with the word ‘freelance’, and I'm almost ready to reclaim that title and marry myself to it again. But at that time, I felt like the word freelance was a really dirty word. And so I was like, no, we're ‘co founders of an agency’.
And we're just doing some secret work for other people on the side. That's actually way more lucrative than our own clients.
Steve Folland: So, geez, I mean, God, so you've got a very stressful home situation to deal with, but also you're both self employed, you're running a business. So you have no choice, but to make that work.
Lucy Werner: I probably should have put my hands up more and said, Hey, help, like we could do with some few clients. Does anybody know anyone? But I had this like PR, I was like, always ‘hype yourself’, always be promoting, always be... So the exterior was that we looked really successful as an agency and we still had this team and we had this office in our back garden.
But the reality was lots of tears and fear behind the scenes. Of what we were going to do. And also it wasn't even as easy as one of us could just get a full time job because we didn't know when we were going to get discharged from Great Ormond Street (the children’s hospital in London). So there was always this sort of fear that… we felt we both needed to be there.
And the way we were going to survive it was if we just stuck together, which in the end did work, but looking back, I think it took us too long to realize, Hey, one of us could just actually freelance for somebody else for a while. That's okay.
Lucy Werner: We were just heading into 2020 and we were like, maybe now that we've got the all clear with the second child, maybe we could try just taking a break in France for a bit, recalibrating, figure out what we want to do next. Hospital discharged us for six months. Yeah. You can take a break.Go abroad if you want.
We were like, yes, we went to book our trip to France in March 2020, and you may recall…
And actually I would say, I found the pandemic really great because I didn't really want to see anybody because I was this ball of anxiety. We're still processing everything that happened. So just to hide in my garden shed and work with Adrienne and not talk to anybody else for 18 months was ideal for me at that time.
And everybody else was like, this is so stressful. And I was like, oh, the year before was actually a bit worse for me. So this is all right. So that was kind of the next iteration. And again, I was planning to… I'm going to build out the education arm, which at that point we were like, okay, we're going to call it Hype Yourself.com.
There was loads of people moving to online learning. Funnily enough for us, the kind of trend in the pandemic split our clients into two. It was either those that had loads of money that wanted us to do it for them. Also, I haven't done my website in five years and now I need to be seen online because I can't go out anywhere and see someone. I need a new website or I need to have visibility or I want to get on podcasts or I want to host my own workshop and I don't know what to say.
So we suddenly had this new audience of other freelancers who wanted to learn how we did what we did, but didn't necessarily have the big budget. So we were like, right, we're going to go all in on HypeYourself.com - do all the education there and split it out.
But we both ended up taking on so many clients on The Wern that we ended up taking freelancers on and started to accidentally scale again. Um, so then it was kind of we then had to kind of reverse and row back from that. So that's kind of then like 2021.
And there was that summer period, you know, when they let us out… And we went to the Isle of Wight with the kids. And we were there, we were by the sea and it was really idyllic and it was sunny. And we were like, maybe we need to live by the sea.
And one bit I haven't sort of mentioned, if you don't know my partner, Adrienne, he is French and he is from the south of France. And he was very clear with me that if we were going to leave London ever to live by a sea, we would be doing that in France and not the UK. Fair.
So then we started trying to work out whether or not that would be possible. That was actually kind of around the time unromantically that we were like, maybe we should get hitched 'cause we'd never bothered before. But, you know, Brexit being the, the gift that keeps on giving, it was gonna be harder for me to get out here if we weren't.
And then long story short, I guess we, we trialled it out here in a winter time. And then we made the move out here last April, so that was April 2022, and we're now 2023, so I've done a year.
Steve Folland: When you said ‘we had to row back’ because you'd had this plan, sounded like a good plan. Right, I'm going to write a book called Hype Yourself. I'm going to start teaching people Hype Yourself. But at the same time, thanks to the pandemic, actually people are coming to The Wern and wanting help building their brand, building their website and you take on freelancers.
And you said we had to ‘row back’ - what row back towards this plan you'd had of Hype Yourself?
Lucy Werner: Yeah. And I think, you know what the problem is? I think a lot of freelancers have this. We have the work that we do for love and we have the work that we do for money. And you need the money to be able to do the work for love. But if you take on too much money work, there's no time to do the love work. And it was this constant juggle.
And actually, when we came to France to try it for the first time for three months, I fired all of my clients. I had no income, no work on the horizon, and I was just relying on Adrienne's stuff to work, and we launched our first online program with Adrienne.
So we were still kind of working together - in that I was promoting and marketing it, but it was his product and he was teaching it. And out of nowhere, I started getting brands approaching me to do content creation. And all of a sudden I was getting paid to make content because of my expertise in promotion and visibility for small businesses.
So I was like, hold on, if I can make the same amount of money with one client, but with working with brands a month, this should be where I focus my efforts whilst I'm looking after the children full time on this three month trial. During that period, I kind of realized that I had 10 different income streams. Nine plus the agency stuff.
So if I cut the agency and focused on actually promoting the other income streams. I could still make money, just not in the same way as the agency. So it was a real shift for me to actually take the seat back, not be the agency owner, let Adrienne have his clients, which was the money maker, and me to start pivoting and building the educational side that I'd always wanted to do.
Steve Folland: 9 income streams. Can we just tick them off?
Lucy Werner: Affiliates, online courses, workshops for myself, workshops for other people, branded content, my book royalties, my cards that I sell as a product, agency work, I do coaching, like PR mentoring - so I don't count that as agency work as it's not me doing it for them as a client… and speaker fees. So getting paid to do speaking events. So my financials now, I have a target each quarter for each of those different 10 revenue streams.
Steve Folland: So did the fact that you had this lovely diversified income, help with the flexibility of, you know, well, I was going to say working around your family, but also transferring to another country, also health for that matter…
Lucy Werner: I think there's two things really, working with clients in the UK. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to keep that agency side going because actually one of the core bits of PR is knowing the media and having your finger on the pulse a bit.
And I just thought there's only so much that I can read online media and see events happening online. It's very different actually being there and getting a sense of what the feeling in the room is and physically seeing all the articles in a newspaper as opposed to the selected ones that are performing well so they allow that to go online.
There was also with the children, I just didn't want work to be around the clock. And if a crisis hits at seven o'clock on a Friday night with a client, you have to deal with that. That's part of the job. I just didn't have the same bite as when I was kind of in my 30s, pre children to be on tap like that. It wasn't that I fell out of love with the job.
I just… I just love my family more. Basically. Sorry PR. And so, actually when we arrived in France, I kind of wanted to shut The Wern down. But Adrienne was known as such a big part of it that I thought, I don't have the energy to relaunch him as Adrienne Châtelet. And so, actually, when recently he was approached to work for Adobe in France, the first thing I said was, this is brilliant, I can shut the agency down, and I'm just going to kill off The Wern, and people won't think of me as somebody that does PR for them anymore, and I'm just going to focus on Hype Yourself, and people will see me as somebody who's more of an educator and trainer and a mentor in that space.
Steve Folland: And so that's where we are today.
Lucy Werner: That's where we are today! Oh my gosh. So many pivots!
Steve Folland: So RIP The Wern. You are Hype Yourself. But Lucy Werner, like, the importance of your personal brand… is kind of like key to to all of that isn’t it?
Lucy Werner: Yeah. And I would say that's evolved slightly.
Like it used to just be like PR tips for small business. And then as I worked more with Adrienne and we co-wrote a book together, then I was kind of talking more about PR and brand building, and then I kind of realized that PR actually needs a PR makeover and that people think PR is just getting you into a newspaper.
Where as actually, I would argue that everything you do in public, is a relationship with your public, is public relations. So me being on this podcast is me PR’ing myself. The fact that I want to be on your podcast because I know that we have a similar audience and we have the shared values and we kind of have that similar kind of values about life.
I want to be on your podcast. Whereas there could be another freelance podcast host. I think I just really don't agree with their stance or what it is they agree with. So every decision we kind of make in our business when we're talking externally is PR and I kind of consider that to be more like ‘self promotion’ as an accessible word to people, because they think of PR as literally just getting into a newspaper.
Whereas if I say to you, I'm going to help you with your self promotion. They're like, Oh, okay. So I'm going to be like, promoting myself. And it's like, yes, that's ultimately what we are doing - is we're using your profile to connect with other people, to connect to your audience so they go, I really like that person. Maybe I want to work with them.
Steve Folland: What do you think has worked the best for you in terms of your own self promotion?
Lucy Werner: Public speaking – always. There's something about that face to face, that you can't replicate online. It's that feeling in the room, the fact that people come up and talk to you afterwards, it's always been my biggest new business driver and led to me getting other opportunities.
So yeah, for me, even though I don't ever walk out into public speaking without having five minutes beforehand where I've done like 20 wees, and I'm there doing my power pose backstage and I'm having to take deep breaths, even though I'll have my slides and I will have rehearsed it and I know what I'm doing. There's always this sort of sheer panic of, Oh my goodness, there's going to be somebody in the audience that knows this better than me and they're going to think I'm an idiot.
So I kind of… There's an element to how I promote myself, like on my Instagram or when I'm public speaking, I liken to my drag queen alter ego. It's still me, but it's just a more confident, badass version of myself.
Steve Folland: Does the drag queen alter ego have a name?
Lucy Werner: I guess the drag queen is probably The Wern. I actually used to say this in therapy, that like, there's Lucy Werner and then there's like The Wern. And The Wern, I was like, you can't tell me anything about what I do in work. Like, I am a great PR. I'm great at my job. I'm great at what I do.
So when people talk about imposter syndrome at work, I'm like, I don't have that. But in life, I'm like, oh my god, I hate myself. Like, oh, how can I teach my kids to love themselves? I don't even like myself. And then it's sort of having to realise that they're actually the same person. My therapist is like, it is the same person Lucy.
So The Wern was this kind of vibrant, brightly coloured, funnier, all singing, all dancing version of myself on the stage.
Steve Folland: Did writing the book work for you in the way that you wanted it to?
Lucy Werner: Hype Yourself, my first book baby was ace. Except when I did my… so I won my book deal from doing a book proposal challenge and afterwards I had some training with my editor and she said, actually, you know, it's not so much about writing a book for other people.
It's also thinking about how you can make that book work for yourself as a publicity tool. So where are you directing people next? And I was promoting myself so hard in 2019. So this is around the time that we had the Great Ormond Street hospital situation going on. That all these people arrived wanting to work with me and I didn't have anything to sell to them.
So it kind of felt like I had this shop and everybody was queuing up and then I was opening the door and going, Sorry, can you come back later? I don't know when I'm opening again or what it is I'm selling, but it looks great, right? And everyone was like, yeah…
It was awful.
Steve Folland: if you released Hype Yourself now?..
Lucy Werner: …I would have the systems and processes and products in place. And actually... I think I'm going to jump the gun on ‘what it is that you would tell your younger self’, but actually I would tell my younger self to really pay attention to who you take business advice from because I got so distracted by what other people were doing and what other people told me to do.
I kept losing sight of what it was that I wanted to do, which is actually now, but it's kind of taken me seven, eight years to really find that's a hundred percent in the direction I want to be in and do it.
Steve Folland: Did you have a coach?
Lucy Werner: When I started out, I didn't know about people like you or other Facebook groups where other parents who are freelancers were coming. I mean, I wasn't a parent then either. So I did an online course on how to be an entrepreneur for 500 pounds. That was crap. And then I was taking advice from a CEO of Adland.
He basically was training me how to scale it and sell it for a million, which was never really what I wanted to do, but I felt like that's what I should do. And I remember him talking about me returning from mat leave. He wanted me to return before Christmas so I could ramp up the new business ready to kick off the new year.
And I was like… I don't really want to do that. And then I kind of actually got distracted a lot by some of the other mums having children with my second child and they were really smashing it online at that time. There was lots of making six figures, making seven figures and sell, sell, sell. And ‘I'm giving birth and I'm still doing a story from the birthing suite about my online course’ kind of thing.
And I was just not there at all either, but then I felt I was really failing. as a business owner, a freelancer, because I was just like, I'm not making any money and I kind of want to be at home with my baby.
And so I've had a third child since then and somebody gave me the advice that actually It's not just giving myself permission when I stay at home with my child. It's also giving other mothers permission that they can do it too. And I think there's a real complicated message of like, being, oh, but that's a position of privilege because you're not working versus, well, actually I stocked up for a while and I'm helping my husband do his job and I feel like I need to excuse the fact that I maybe don't want to work and just be a full time mother for a bit.
It's very complex and a bit of a cancellation culture, minefield space to be in. But I realized I didn't see that many mums saying, ‘it's okay just to tighten your belt, and not work for a bit, and maybe just work a tiny bit part time, but basically be on maternity leave’. There’s no word to describe that.
Like, I'm kind of on a micro maternity leave. I'm micro working. I don't know. But that's what I wanted to kind of set out with this time.
Steve Folland: There's so much that we could talk about. There are so many things that you do. There's so many things on top of that that you could do. How do you decide which of the shiny objects are for you?
Lucy Werner: This time round, it is purely what do I have the bandwidth for? And it's almost like account managing myself. Like how many hours a week do you realistically have?
What can you actually do in that time? That's not going to burn you out. How much money do you need to make to help keep the lights on? And I've actually been doing a bit of a cost cutting exercise as part of this. I'm going to take the online courses down. Because a great thing about having 10 revenue streams, for example, is you're like, oh, there's 10 ways to make money, but they only make money if you're promoting them.
And I don't want to spend my whole maternity leave promoting all the different things that I have. So actually I'm just focusing on the speaking gigs and the workshops, because if I get one or two of those big ones lined up, that will cover me for a month or two versus how many courses I need to sell, or how many copies of my book, or how many of the PR tips product, or how many times I promote another service as an affiliate link.
Like that's a lot more work. So I guess it's kind of that age old thing of going for a fewer things that are a big ticketer, but then doing the stuff I love. So I really want to spend the day to day just focusing on the content creation for fun, because I enjoy that. And because I'm an Adobe Express ambassador, I'm really lucky that I get a challenge a month from them.
So I kind of know for a while, touch wood, that I've got the income from that coming through, which is going to help me with the food shops.
Steve Folland: But you've taken your courses down, which some people listening might be like, but surely that's… you've made a course… is that not passive income? Or do you have to be present on them?
Lucy Werner: I do try and always include some live element because I think it helps people keep accountable. So I include Q&A. But then that's another platform I'm paying for to have the booking into my calendar automated so that I'm not doing that as a task. Then I've got the course platform and the calendar platform on annual subscriptions that I wanted to get rid of as a cost because I don't want to be paying for that. The video call platform…
So, my online courses. There was a direct correlation historically to how much I promote them versus how many sales I make. Occasionally, I do get an evergreen person purchasing it. But very rarely, if I was more organized, maybe I would have a quiz on my website and then an email marketing funnel system.
And it would tell people you need to buy this. And it would send them three or four emails to chase them into doing it. That’s not for me. It's just not my personality. I kind of feel like if the course is good for you and you want to do it, I want you to do it. And that's terrible marketing and promotion advice.
You do need to upsell, especially if it's a new person. I know all of that. It's just not a system that feels comfortable for me. It's like wearing a suit. I know it would make me look more professional. I don't want to wear it.
It's just not for me. Also, I wrote that course and made it and took loads of time on it. But you do need to keep going in and revising it and for me right now, it's just… it's another thing. So it might come back. But for now, it's definitely coming down. I won't have childcare for another year.
Steve Folland: The branded content that you talked about, so you mentioned Adobe for example. So, did you go after that, did that simply come to you because they saw you doing your thing online?
Lucy Werner: You know what came before that, which was insane, I was getting bored of talking about PR all the time and I thought, I'm going to start talking about other general small business freelance advice.
And just to clarify, by the way, I consider freelancers small business owners because you are acting like a small business. So when I say small business, this still applies to freelancers. I talked about how when I wanted to get a job in PR, I didn't have a CV, I had a scrapbook, and I basically made collages of the different campaigns I worked on.
I did a collage page of who I was, and I did all this where I thought it was really wacky, probably quite normal scrapbook to promote myself, and I took it to one interview and the woman wouldn't even open it. And she was like, I only want to see a CV. Funnily enough, I didn't get that job.
The next one I went to, the next agency, they were like, this is so cool, they were flipping through every page, and they were asking me about my historical PR experience based on this scrapbook. The most fun interview I've ever had, and I ended up getting the job.
And so I was talking about how, you know, when you're actually pitching yourself out for in house roles, think about how you're presenting yourself. And the company who made the scrapbook got in touch with me and said, is that one of our scrapbooks?!
And I was like, yes. And they were like, cool, can you tag us in it? And we'll reshare it. And then they were the ones who said, ‘Oh, we were creating a series of small business tips for our audience. Do you want to maybe do something around how to have the best headshot? Because I've seen you talk about that in your book and on your channel?’. So I was like, yes. Then I was approached by a sex toy company and a dry cleaning company.
Steve Folland: One after the other. How good was the sex toy?!
Lucy Werner: I didn't work with either of them because I was like, it's not in line with my values - and my audience might enjoy it, but that's not really what I'm known for.
And I felt like that was too far into making me an influencer if you like, whereas actually my kind of shtick is ‘Helping small business owners to get themselves out there’. And then yeah, Adobe approached me and said, ‘we're running an ambassador program in Europe. We're looking for a beta tester. Do you have time and would you like to have a go at doing this?’ And I just sacked off all of my clients. I was like, yes I want to do this. So that's how that started.
Steve Folland: These people are finding you because you're just putting yourself out there anyway.
Lucy Werner: It’s always been Instagram for me and it's funny because I put so much content on instagram and you have those days where you're losing more followers and there's no engagement, and you're like ‘what is going on?’ and then out of the blue you're like ‘Oh, actually the marketing manager from Adobe UK has been following me for 12 months and I didn't even notice and now they're booking me for this opportunity’, which is actually kind of what happened.
It was the same with the stationery company. It was the girl in house who was following me, but in both of these instances, it didn't say who they worked for. You know, they literally just could have been called like Dave and Becky. Do you know what I mean? I had no idea who these people were, but they were just following me.
And because I stuck to what it is that I always talk about, I was sort of front of mind when they were like, okay, we want somebody that talks to creative small business owners.
Steve Folland: You have a mailing list as well,
Lucy Werner: Yeah, I've just moved that to Substack. What I like about the mailing list is it gives that opportunity where I feel there's more of a two way relationship so I get kind of more feedback or more engagement and I guess because I own that data you know, like with Instagram my engagement is dreadful, like on a good week I'm just about creeping up to like two to three percent, most the time I'm at one.
Whereas my newsletter, my open rate is 50%, so I know that I'm hitting 50 percent of that audience and it's mine, I own that so I know I can hit 50 percent of my audience at any time that I want. But I've written a monthly newsletter for five years. So I've always kept consistent on what it is I talk about and what it is that I do, which can be quite dull, but it
Steve Folland: How much time do you put into being visible - effectively doing your own PR?
Lucy Werner: Every day. Every single day.
Steve Folland: As a conscious scheduled thing or just simply go onto the internet?..
Lucy Werner: No, it's not scheduled. Unless I've been booked to do a campaign, I've got something specific coming up. So say if I'm doing a talk, I'll know that I'm going to do a pre event, a pre talk post at talk post and after talk post. I always try and do that with everything, it's like minimum of three. So today I'd probably do a story that I've been with you, then we'll do another one when it comes out, then we'll do at least another one after it comes out.
Then you have anniversaries, like, oh, it was a year ago that I recorded this with Steve. Like, I'm always finding reasons to keep recycling, but...
Yeah, I guess part of it is also because I do sell my own stuff and tickets and I don't want to be selling all the time so there's probably a bit of feeling like I need to be giving as much value so when I do sell it's not as gross for my audience and they're not just sat there watching me do adverts all day long, but also I enjoy it.
Like I have fun making content. I have fun thinking about what works. I'm a bit of a geek. So I like looking at the data. Last week I did two pieces of exactly the same content, but one was a reel and one was a carousel. Cause I wanted to do a little micro test, which one's working better? With my newsletter, I'm like, which links are working well?
I did three maternity takeovers. When I had immediately given birth and I automatically knew from the links they put in which ones my audience would like the most. Like I've got to know them all so well now. So for me it is like finding the things that is going to interest them. Um, and also there's that bit of...
Making sure I'm stretching myself. So what's a massive podcast that I want to be on? And so I have these kinds of moments where I think I haven't pitched myself for a while. I'm going to pitch myself out to something I've really wanted to be on or something I really want to speak at and give it a go.
And actually there's lots of times where it's not always that easy to be a headline speaker or to do whatever. So I find other ways to get myself in events, like teaching a workshop… So I'm always like, how can I get my first rung on that ladder?
Steve Folland: And what has been the biggest challenge of being freelance?
Lucy Werner: I would say actually… it's when you're going through something personally traumatic and my job is showing up.
You know, I talk about hyping yourself and being out there and promoting all the time and it's really hard to do that when behind the scenes you're going through something really traumatic and for some people, you know, the pandemic was the most traumatic thing to happen so I think for a lot of freelancers it was then but for me, it was definitely 2019 was That was the biggest challenge for me by far, because not only was that kind of no work and all this stuff happening, like there was a financial stress and the emotional stress.
But during that period, we also had a legal threat as well, which is always, you know, an additional stress as well. So I think it's that duality of showing up, but also what's happening behind the doors.
Steve Folland: So did you just always continue to show up despite all of that or did you take a break?
Lucy Werner: My darkest days, I always showed up, but now I know more to not do that.
Steve Folland: Yeah, because I wonder… because it's unfortunately just one of those things where all of us at some point will have something, it's inevitable. And I see it with people where sometimes maybe they have stepped back from being visible and they almost feel bad about coming back - will have people have noticed or…
Lucy Werner: There’s that and I think for me there's also this… it was really hard because there's that kind of parasocial relationship. So my friends would see me and I was in my brightest clothes, wearing the most makeup - it was almost like war paint.
If I'm wearing red lipstick and loads of eyeliner, that typically means I'm having the most stressful day ever. So the more colorful, more vibrant I am externally, normally the more in crisis I am. So I was showing up as this super happy, confident, smiling, everything's fine… And behind the scenes, I'm like completely crumbling and no one's messaging and going, are you okay? Cause I've got this facade that everything's fine on the exterior. So I don't recommend that to be honest.
Steve Folland: You think it's better for us just to step back?
Lucy Werner: Step back. And you know what as well? When you step back, it feels like eternity. If you take a month or two months, six months for you, it feels like you've been off for ages. Most people don't notice.
They really don't. Majority. A few people are probably going to message and be like, Hey, you okay? But the majority of your followers are just like, Oh, you're taking a break. We all need to do that. It's normal. But we feel this need to come back on and make excuses. I'm back now. It's like, no one cares.
Steve Folland: It's so hard though. When that also part of what drives your business.
Lucy Werner: It is hard. A hundred percent. I wanted to really be off socials completely this mat leave, but I'm getting paid to make content. So I feel like I can't just show up when I'm making content. I still have to keep it going.
Steve Folland: Lucy, it's been so good to talk to you. It's also nice to know that you haven't got bright red lipstick and loads of eyeliner on.
Lucy Werner: I've got a pale jumpsuit on people. We're fine.