Purpose Driven Freelancer Ettie Bailey-King
About this podcast episode…
Inclusive and Accessible Comms Educator Ettie Bailey-King
Ettie struggled with traditional education systems due to undiagnosed ADHD and felt out of place in the normal working world.
It all changed when she started her own freelance business - literally creating a job title for herself.
Determined to make a difference in the inclusive language and accessibility space she set about educating others through content creation. Using LinkedIn posts, her in-depth ‘Fighting Talk' newsletter on Substack, and speaking engagements.
Ettie shares her approach to flexible pricing, balancing pro bono and low bono work with paid projects, and maintaining work-life balance.
Ettie also talks about crafting her freelance business around her values, the importance of branding and photography, and the autonomy and freedom that comes with freelancing.
Through freelancing, Ettie’s created a role that draws on her neurodivergent strengths, whilst using the flexibility of freelance life to set a work schedule that protects her.
She emphasises the need to set boundaries, take care of yourself, and embrace the opportunities for creativity and personalisation to suit your own needs that freelancing offers.
Read a full transcript & get Links in the tabs.
More from ETTIE BAILEY-KING
Ettie’s website
Ettie’s Fighting Talk newsletter
Ettie on LinkedIn
More from Steve Folland
Transcript of the Being Freelance podcast with Steve Folland and Freelance inclusive and accessible communication educator Ettie Bailey-King
Steve Folland: Let's head to London to chat to this week's guest, and that is inclusive and accessible communication educator, Ettie Bailey- King. Hey, Ettie! As ever, how about we get started hearing how you got started being freelance?
Ettie Bailey-King: Okay, I'm going to start right at the beginning, so I may win some awards here for the longest and most unnecessarily detailed answer, but let's start off. Okay, so I was born and then sometime afterwards I went to school and I want to chat a little bit about my journey through school because I think this might resonate with some people.
So all through school, when I was really passionate about a subject, so I loved English literature, languages. Loved classical mythology. I was very cool. Anything to do with the subjects that I loved, I was hyper focused in. I was really passionate and engaged and I just excelled in them.
And anything that I didn't find interesting, I just found like my brain would switch itself off. I couldn't even stay sat in my seat. And I would, if I could show up to the lessons, then I wouldn't really mentally show up, if you know what I mean. And there was this struggle all through my school years of feeling like...
I've actually read back over some of my old school reports and it's really depressing because it's always endlessly sort of coded references to me being lazy or needing to apply myself or being sort of someone with high potential who's wasting her talents with this like really moralized language.
And I was just struggling with things which, knowing what I know now about neurodivergence, are just like screamingly obvious ADHD presentations, if not ADHD, some of them are kind of like possibly autism presentations, and I went through school feeling like I was so broken and inadequate and couldn't do the job of what other people could do, which was the showing up, the sitting in their seat, remembering to write down the homework and then doing the tasks.
And I just kind of swung through with this like chaotic, volatile energy. And I crafted a bit of a persona to try and cover it up where I was like, me, I'm so free spirited. And there was maybe like 1 percent truth to that. But overall I was just chaotic. I struggled so much with getting focused. And so I went through school feeling like there was a lot wrong with me and being baffled by how other people did what I saw as the practical work of showing up.
And I knew I had ability, but I just couldn't reconcile it with why, like, actually, here's a weird example I was reflecting on. Couldn't show up to my math lessons, but I could and did sign up for before school lessons in ancient Greek from a nun from the local Who was offering these lessons and I was like, great.
I want to do that and I can do that, but can I get, you know, more than 3 percent on a basic history quiz? No. So my point is there was always this tension and I think what's really funny is that now a lot of people obsess over the risk of labeling children. They're like, Oh, don't label children as ADHD or autistic.
And for sure, there can be issues around that. But I got labeled lazy and unfocused and problematic. And so I went through school, just really feeling very inadequate. And then I got through university in the same sort of technique that I'd found, which was about to Digging into what I was passionate about so I would find something I could hyper focus on, get really obsessed with that.
And then that would be like my favorite subject and I'd do it for my dissertation. I'd stay up all night reading about it, but it was exhausting. And as I came to the end of university and friends of mine were doing like law degrees or joining programs to become accountants. Not only did I think that sounded deathly boring. But I was thinking like, how on earth would that work for me? Like, I can't, I can't show up on time and answer the questions. So I basically opted out of feeling like I was equipped for quote unquote normal work. And I chose instead to kind of flip between a whole load of different jobs.
And I'm really glad I did that because I did get to do some really cool stuff. So I did loads of temporary jobs in a whole range of sectors. I worked for a beer festival. I was a speech writer. I worked in finance. That was a terrible mistake. I started training to be a psychotherapist. I did a master's. I started a PhD.
I immediately stopped a PhD. I worked as a private tutor for filthy rich families. And it was so interesting. So varied. And it just left me still feeling like why can I not do what other people seem to be doing? When I had a job that paid the bills, I could do the job because I had to, but then I couldn't seem to connect it with the part of me that was also, like, passionate and engaged.
And I was so baffled by how other people did this. So then in my late 20s, I eventually just fell under so much pressure to prove that I could get a " proper job", whatever that means you know, a permanent contract, that I started working in the charity sector and I worked in communications for some international development charities.
And as I did that work, I found, okay, I can do some of this showing up thing. I can do the practical aspects ish, like it takes a lot out of me, but I can just about do it. But then I found I couldn't do the diplomacy and the politics and the social side of answering questions when people would say, 'be honest with us, tell us what you really think'.
And then I would, and they would not like the answers. And so there was this different sense in which I felt very broken and very like out of the normal ways of doing things. And after a couple of years of working in international development -I promise I'm almost done on this award winningly long answer, bear with me -
I just got to this point where I was so distressed by what I saw as like, the structural injustice of international development. So just a few examples. I remember getting flown out to a meeting in Kenya when I was like 28 and I knew precisely nothing about anything that was going on at the meeting and I kept getting treated as an expert.
People kept treating me with loads of respect as though I had wise insights to offer and when I say that I had none, I had none. And it was because of this structural racism whereby white people and people from countries like the US and the UK were getting, I think, a lot of the time, undue credit. Or they were getting paid, like, way higher salaries than local people for doing the same job when they didn't even have local expertise.
Or we were kind of all going about this work talking about things like poverty and not talking about how we get there. got there and what caused it, which in a lot of countries, not all countries, but many is because of European colonialism and foreign intervention. And I just felt like this feels so racist and colonialist and like, just, it doesn't make any sense to me.
I just couldn't do it any longer. So at that point that was 2019. I set up as a freelancer and I decided to become an inclusive and accessible communication educator. And we're almost five years in. And now I have to say that being freelance is like the perfect fit for me, but as you can see, it came from a lot of push factors, a lot of feeling like I just wasn't equipped for this normal working world.
And that's, yeah, that's how I got started.
Steve Folland: There's so much I could ask from that. One though, that jumps out at me is - Did you know that an 'inclusive and accessible communication educator' existed? Like that, that was a thing because you became one?
Ettie Bailey-King: It's not a thing. I have become one. And in so doing, I have made it a thing. I believe there are lots of people working on the inclusive side of things and just to give a brief definition, so by inclusive language we kind of mean how do you find a way of talking about age, gender, disability, race, sex, sexual orientation, all of that kind of thing which is accurate and respectful and which moves people to take action to combat discrimination.
And then on the accessible side of things, it's about making content. So anything from like a PowerPoint to an instant message to an in person conversation, it's about making that accessible to blind people, deaf people, dyslexic, dyspraxic, ADHD. O C D. I mean, I can just put all of that under the umbrella 'neurodivergent' and stop talking. But my point is, it's about making content work better for everyone, whether they're disabled, neurodivergent, tired or distracted. And there are people working on all those different aspects of communication for sure. But as far as I know, I think I might be the only person doing both of them.
And at the time that I went freelance, I certainly didn't know that was a thing. I just jumped without knowing what I was jumping into.
Steve Folland: If you have created a thing, which is brilliant, how do you find the clients? How are they finding you if they don't know to search for the thing that you are?
Ettie Bailey-King: So a lot of the time people are finding me through either my LinkedIn posts or my newsletter. And I'll basically find that whenever I say, create like an informative LinkedIn post or write a newsletter that's really focused on one aspect, like ADHD friendly communication, I'll always get replies from people who will say, I've been looking for something like this.
I didn't have the language for knowing what I was looking for, and I didn't even know that there was a need for this. So quite often people are coming to me and saying... oh, I gave a talk about like autism and autistic friendly communication styles. And I had someone telling me that they've realized that they might be on the autism spectrum, that people in their team might be autistic and that they really needed this knowledge.
But if you're not looking for it, it's really, really hard to know how to look for it. So I guess the short answer is. I do a lot of content creation and a lot of what might be called content marketing, such as writing about my specific topics and pushing them out there. And the other way I get my clients is, because my work is almost entirely giving workshops now, giving talks, when I give a talk, quite often it will be to like a team of copywriters at a marketing consultancy.
And then someone in that team will say, could you come and talk to my professional association that I'm also part of, or they'll leave that company, go to another organization, and then they'll invite me there. So it's kind of this flow of like, direct referrals or nearly direct referrals from people that have just come along to a talk.
And particularly if I talk at a really big conference, there'll normally be a few people who want to kind of bring some of that some of that. learning back to somewhere else that they're involved.
Steve Folland: Was there a period of, like, I can see how now, right? Five years on. All of these things have picked up speed all of these different connections bring you work was there a period at the beginning when that wasn't the case when you had to kind of push through and believe him in the content you were putting out there in this job you to create for yourself?
Ettie Bailey-King: Absolutely. And what is wild to me is how much of the freelance journey is putting yourself out there, truly believing that you... almost like acting as though you have the expertise a little bit before you have it. I don't want to imply that people should be out there claiming to have expertise that they don't.
I think that would be really unhelpful and unethical, but there's an element of like being able to own that you probably have all this knowledge that's come from, not necessarily from professional certification, but from previous volunteering, from lived experience, from your last jobs, and just having that confidence of showing up as somebody who could deliver those workshops, even if no one is currently asking you to do them.
I did so much existing as a person who says, Hello, I'm an inclusive and accessible communication educator before anyone hired me to deliver those workshops, there was such a long period, and I have no concept of time, so I can't tell you if it was six months or four and a half years, somewhere between the two of those, where it was just an act of faith, like continuing to show up and put that content out there and be really public with what I believed to be my expertise before the sort of conference keynote booking requests, you know, the sort of like the corresponding opportunities actually came in.
Steve Folland: And in those early days, because I've I've introduced you as an inclusive and accessible communication educator. Had you always called yourself that or have you tweeked that job title over the years?
Ettie Bailey-King: So for a long time, I was calling myself a consultant. And I think what that reflected was, well, consultant can be anything, right? That can cover all manner of thousands of different job types. And that was very convenient to me because I was doing this mixture of like, creating inclusive language guides.
So I would get a client like Amnesty International or some major charity or company that wanted a good guide for their staff. Oh, I did one recently for like Guys & St. Thomas's and it's coming up with sort of informative material about all the topics that they work on and then helping them understand how to think about how racism and ageism and sexism and ableism and so on show up in relation to their work and then guiding them in how to talk about that and how to think about that.
And that strikes me as a consultant type job because it's a lot of desk research and it's a lot of like creating written materials - there would also be training workshops but I wouldn't have really called that being an educator and then over time as I found that the workshops and the live training is really the bit that gets me so excited and just peaks my energy and makes me just really happy to, like, start my work day.
I thought, why am I showing up in public with an identity that might make you think that all I do is write written guides? And to be clear, I do think there is value in that. But it was quite strange to me that I kept marketing myself in this way that might make somebody think that sort of all I did was desk research.
And then eventually, after a lot of wrangling and working with my business coach, she helped me say, like, if the part of your job that really excites you is the giving talks, you need to make that obvious and you need to be putting that right there in the name. So that is, yeah, that's what explained the switch to educator
Steve Folland: So interesting. When did you start working with a business coach?
Ettie Bailey-King: About a year ago. Is that true? Again, less than five years ago, I think maybe about a year ago.
Steve Folland: And what's your experience of that been? And how did you find them?
Ettie Bailey-King: So she's amazing. She's called Catherine Stag Macy, little plug for Catherine and her podcast. So Catherine invited me to be on her podcast, Unsaid At Work, and it was through chatting to her there and getting to know each other and sort of talking about my challenges that she then realized that she would be able to support me with a lot of the things that I was working on.
So that was just amazing. I mean, it was kind of like she arrived by magic into my life. I wouldn't know personally how to sift through hundreds or thousands of different candidates. If I were out there looking, it just started with like quite a personal connection.
Steve Folland: So content marketing, content creation is obviously an important thing. So you said LinkedIn posts. How often are you showing up on LinkedIn?
Ettie Bailey-King: I don't have any kind of strategy for how I show up there. I post whenever I have a thought, or because a lot of my thoughts arrive, like, in the middle of the night, I will write something down and save it to write it during more reasonable working hours, or I'll schedule it to post when people are awake.
I'm just really guided by whatever is on my mind and whatever I'm feeling. So I think it probably equates to, I know I'm often posting actually more than once a day on weekdays. And my understanding is that if you're going to be smart about LinkedIn, there's all kinds of algorithmic technical things to keep in mind.
And I'm sure I've heard people saying, don't post more than twice a week or don't post more than once a day because you're, flood your followers. And I just don't follow any of that at all. I just post whenever I feel like it. And it's worked out, it's worked out pretty well for me.
Steve Folland: Okay. And then you have your newsletter, which is on Substack now.
Ettie Bailey-King: I do, it's called Fighting Talk. And in the newsletter, I'm breaking down different aspects of inclusive language and accessibility. So you'll find each week, there will be some kind of a focus on something like how to be LGBTQ plus inclusive with your language how to think about disability and accessibility and kind of like deep dives into specific topics.
We've got some really cool interviews coming up with fascinating people and that I am a lot more disciplined because I think if I were emailing people 50 times a week at three in the morning, they might not be so delighted, at least on LinkedIn you don't have to look at it . So the newsletter goes out at the much more friendly hour of sort of whenever I feel like it on a Tuesday, once a week.
Steve Folland: Okay, but the thing with Substack is that it's possible to turn that into a revenue stream as well, are you making the most of that?
Ettie Bailey-King: Yep. So I've got I just checked, I've got 35 paid subscribers, which I'm sure to someone who's actually making a living off Substack is hilarious and wouldn't even count as a number, but I'm so proud of that. Yeah, I've got a very small number of paid subscribers and what you get if you're a paid subscriber is you get access to all of that content forever, whereas if you're a free subscriber, you get all the content as it comes out for one week, and then after a week, it goes behind a paywall.
So it's very important to me that anyone can access the information I'm sharing because, you know, knowledge about like anti racism and anti sexism, that should not be gatekept, that should be available to anyone that needs it.
But I will say that I think being able to sort of go back in and keep accessing that sort of database of knowledge. I think at that point, if you're going back again and again and again, you're probably doing that in a professional context. You've probably got a team behind you with a manager who's probably going to be willing to pay for a paid subscription because it's like four pounds.
What does it work out as? 50 pounds a year or sort of four pounds a month or something like that. So I don't feel too bad about saying that that kind of long term access to my content is more of a. paid perk and just getting it when it comes out is for everybody.
Steve Folland: Is, is that all of the content marketing that you do? So LinkedIn, Substack?
Ettie Bailey-King: Yeah, that's pretty much all of it. I really find that if I focus my energy and if I can get excited about a specific platform, like I find Substack so exciting. Every time they roll out a new feature, like they just rolled out audio voiceovers where you're almost recording a mini podcast.
They have a podcasting feature as well, but there's just so much interesting stuff you can do there. So I find that incredibly absorbing, and it means that I don't have to take sort of active effort to stay really involved in my substack and to find it fascinating. Whereas there's some other platforms like TikTok, not really interested.
Twitter, if that still exists, I'm not sure, like, because they don't excite me. It's just not very logical for me to focus my energy there. So I just keep it to LinkedIn. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I find LinkedIn an amazing place to be these days. What an evolution LinkedIn has been on.
I find it's now the home of really brilliant, fascinating, justice minded people. There's some incredible anti racists and kind of all sorts of like social justice campaigners hanging out there and it's just a really vibrant and wonderful place to be and I certainly wouldn't be showing up on LinkedIn all the time if I just didn't find it so engaging and interesting and fun to be there.
Steve Folland: Yes, I like that thing of focusing on what, what you're enjoying doing the, the energy we get from it. And also I listened to your email and I thought this is so good. Obviously from an inclusivity point of view, there's a benefit which is at the core of what you do, but also. It really helps you to get, I know your personality comes across in that voice - to help get to know the person on the other end and think, yeah, I want to hire that person or I want to recommend that person.
Ettie Bailey-King: Totally. I love that. And it makes me wonder now is that the reason that they introduced the audio? The sort of voiceover element, I remember thinking it was an accessibility feature and now as you've said that, I'm like, Oh no, that's probably a sort of cold, hard marketing strategy because who do you listen to audio from?
You tend to listen to audio from your closest friends, phone calls, voice notes, and it Is probably a way of creating some of that intimacy and connection, which ultimately for a lot of people will be about, yeah, driving more sales. But frankly, any new fun tool I'm going to have a lot of fun with. So whatever they roll out next, I'll be going absolutely wild on that too.
Steve Folland: Yeah, I think both things can be true at the same time in that instance. So, yeah, we talked about pricing of Substack. I'm more intrigued actually about the pricing of your business, not the specific amounts, but more the fact that you created a job for yourself. There's elements of it where you might be doing, you know, lots of research beforehand or perhaps it's something off the shelf in quotation marks where you've created a workshop and you run it again and again, like, how have you got your head around that side of this business?
Ettie Bailey-King: Great difficulty. I don't find that any of that financial stuff comes easily to me, as I imagine it doesn't come easily to that many of us. So all my workshops currently are very, very bespoke. So I'll be researching a client organization. They will be a Swiss running shoe brand, for example, and I'll be going through all their content, sort of auditing their website and their social media for accessibility, checking out previous campaigns. There's so much like deep background research that then goes into delivering quite a short training. Because if I'm going to give you the tips on how you make your social media more accessible for, let's say, blind people and how you make your internal emails work better for ADHDers.
I need to understand not just what content you're putting out, but why you're doing it. So at the moment, I think where I'm probably getting to a bottleneck in my pricing and my ability to make money is it's so involved with all that background research.
And what I want to actually, what I've just decided to start offering is more of like a group program where instead of me giving these highly bespoke trainings, which take me a lifetime to prepare for. Instead, I'm going to have this group program where a bunch of people from different companies and charities will all come together and they'll be on this little cohort with me. And then we'll have training sessions on specific topics from inclusive language and accessibility, probably like two a month.
And then they'll have Q and A sessions where we'll like workshop their content and we'll go through it live and I'll give them and we'll get external experts in. So that way, It's sort of, it's a combination of like, I don't think it's really sustainable for me to keep working in the way that I'm working, but also, I just think it will be so energizing.
And the more I learn about my brain and how it works, it's all about leaning into what gives me energy as opposed to what will, like, detract from it. And something about preparing for a workshop is just so energizing. And knowing that I'm going to get these completely unexpected questions from people whose context I don't know is quite, you know, You know, like it keeps you on your toes.
Yeah. So that's going to be part of my offer. I'm not sure how I'm going to price it yet because none of that stuff comes easily to me. It's been, for me, it's been all about leaning on people who do know, either who know more about sort of what's it called? Indexing the market, you know, sort of understanding what's considered a fair market price for stuff.
Or people whose confidence can then rub off on me because I have spent so many years undercharging to a really horrifying and like quite disturbing degree. I would tell people my prices, other freelancers, and they would laugh in my face and say, you're not going to survive if you do that. So just spending time with sort of more established, more seasoned freelancers who have basically said numbers that I wouldn't have been able to say without laughing.
And enough exposure to people like that and just asking people to sort of honestly and privately share with me how they would price stuff. That's really helped push my prices up. But I have been massively undercharging for 99. 9 percent of my career.
Steve Folland: I guess there must be an element as well, though, where some of your clients would be able to pay a lot more. And also. The value that, you know, filters down from what you do has a greater impact. Maybe that's not quite the right phrase, but within their organization, compared to some other smaller organizations or individuals and things like that.
So that flexible pricing seems natural, but it also seems almost impossible for us to imagine sometimes as individuals, how much a big organization would be willing to pay. Because we're not them. We've never been them.
Ettie Bailey-King: Totally. And then I work with somebody like my business coach who will just casually mention a company where someone's paying a thousand pounds an hour for a consultant. And that's just seen as a valid investment. And I come from the charity sector where we would, you know, beg for a new paperclip or some staples and it's such a big mindset shift.
What I do in theory, I practice what's sometimes called solidarity pricing, which is when you, yeah, tailor the prices based on the organization, their ability to pay. And I do a ton of pro bono or low bono, so like very low priced work for grassroots and sort of community organizations and yeah, other people who do justice work, but don't have the budget.
And then I have sort of, I don't know what to call it. I guess I have a sort of equation that I'm using to then calculate what the bigger organizations with sort of, like, a more commercial way of being in the world, what they can pay, and the way that I test that out is essentially just to share the price with them and then see what they say.
And it always amazes me how the really, really big corporates will just, they won't even blink at numbers that I find absolutely terrifying. And again, it's probably an indication I could up the prices tenfold or twentyfold, but there's also something about staying within the limits of like what feels safe to you.
Like it wouldn't, for me, it would feel ludicrous to be throwing a load of zeros on the end of my prices because that just wouldn't feel right for me. There's definitely a journey to go on there in terms of. becoming more confident with charging more, but I'm not going to force myself to do that overnight.
Steve Folland: When you have such a purpose driven business. You have this beautiful moment where you can do pro bono or low bono work, but obviously you also need to keep the lights on and and pay those bills. Have you found it tricky to balance that time when you have to say no, but you want to say yes?
Ettie Bailey-King: Yeah, I find that incredibly difficult. And actually the other balance that I find so hard to get right is feeling as though a lot of my mission is just getting knowledge about inclusive language and accessibility out there. And because that feels like my mission and getting the paid training workshops is the mechanism, yeah, the way that I make it sustainable.
It has sometimes meant that I've had weeks where I'm spending dozens and dozens of hours, I might spend 30 hours researching a newsletter, 10 hours preparing for like a really, really detailed introduction to a topic, like sort of anti ableism, again, that might go into my newsletter, and then feeling as though I've squeezed out all the potential to be doing paid work within that, and it's such a difficult balance to get right.
I'm practicing having stricter rules around how much time I'm allowed to spend on the content marketing side of things, but it's been really hard sort of reframing it because for a long time I believed like that was my duty to get all the information out there and that I need to be kind of like funneling all this information out there because people don't know how screen readers work and people don't know that their websites are frequently, almost always inaccessible to a whole range of disabled people.
And over time, what I'm kind of, I'm rolling back on that and saying that like the knowledge does need to get out there, but it's not my duty to get all of the knowledge out there right away without being able to pay my bills.
Steve Folland: Yeah, you said earlier, I forget which point now about something being exhausting work life balance is important, and I'm wondering how you found that side of things over the past five years,
Ettie Bailey-King: Oh, that's been a really painful part of the journey for sure. Yeah, work life balance has not come easily to me at all. The reframe that's been helpful most recently is actually stopping thinking of it. as work life balance at all, stopping thinking of those as sort of like separate aspects of my life or things that need to be like held in balance and more telling myself that my job is to eat a nourishing meal and my job is to go to bed at a reasonable time because if I'm not looking after myself in the parts of my life around the working day, then I'm not going to be showing up very effectively during the workday.
Every all nighter that I used to pull trying to get a project done right before the deadline, that energy doesn't come from nowhere. You're borrowing it. You're incurring a sleep debt or an energy debt or something else. And I've tried to sort of. reframe it as like, because my job is to give the best possible workshop, well then my job is also to eat like not a bag of crisps for lunch and to take a break before 3pm and to maybe go outside like once in the workday and for that workday to be a discrete entity that begins and ends and isn't just this sort of long amorphous blob of like 7 to 23 hours.
Like I've done, I've really committed all the the burnout crimes and there's been so many, such long periods in my working life where it was just cycles of burnout again and again and again, making myself really ill. I've got like near permanent injuries in my right arm from overwork from repetitive strain injury.
And not only is that just terrifying and unhealthy, but it makes you worse at your job. So if the aim is to keep on working because you're so passionate about the impact that your work has, or you're just so excited to build, then the well being has to be part of it. Otherwise, you can't do the first part.
You can't do the bit you're passionate about. If you're not also looking after yourself.
Steve Folland: Your whole story started with feeling different being labeled, you know, in a different way. And then discovering your own neurodivergence. How have you crafted your freelance business around those things so that you get, you know, those, you, you lean into that.
Ettie Bailey-King: I think there's a few different parts to it. There's the practical element of recognizing that once you're freelance, like, I wonder how many people are freelance or running their own business, but actually still showing up to work in exactly the same way that they did when they had a boss, still following, like, probably their old company's working hours and working practices.
I did this for at least the first, I want to say, four of my five years of freelancing, whereby I was still performing for this imagined manager, and it suddenly hit me. I was like, nobody knows. Nobody actually knows if I'm at my desk at 8. 59 or not. And more often, like, the more I forced myself to fit what was sort of inherited standards of professionalism, the more I would be showing up sort of officially at a specific time or feeling the need to be kind of, you know, in my inbox, refreshing my emails, but the less and less I was actually bringing my focus and my energy.
So for me, there's been an aspect of just getting really pragmatic and saying what actually serves the work, what delivers the most impact. It's not showing up to sort of punch in for the day of work. It's paying attention to my energy flows. Something I found really interesting was learning about you know, people have sort of basically different chronotypes.
So you have like. early birds. I don't think it's called that. Morning larks, something like - then you've got night owls. And then there's a sort of a mixture of the two, which is sometimes referred to as a third bird. The point being some people thrive in the mornings, some people sort of thrive later in the day.
And there's all these sort of energy fluctuations within that. And it's quite natural for people to have let's say a little bit of a dip in the early afternoon. And I just hadn't actually forgiven myself for being a mammal, for being a human animal with like varying energy needs and with varying attention and learning about that and then thinking like, okay, so I can decide when I do my most demanding work.
I can choose to do my most focused and most sort of important let's say like high level research work in the start of the day, because knowing myself as I do, that's when I'm going to bring my best. And it's been such, it's been so much harder even than that sounds to give myself permission to be varied.
The other thing I really keep in mind is, I think a lot of us imagine that we should be able to do something in the neighborhood of a 40 hour week and also you know, have a home that is habitable and not some sort of like constant hygiene threat from the mold in the sink and whatever else is going on.
But as I learned about like the history of the working week and how the sort of early 40 hour week was predicated on a worker, pretty much always a man, married to a woman who would be at home doing all the unpaid care labor, doing all the cooking and the It's really helped me understand that At least for me, if it feels like those two things are in tension, it's because they often are practically, and if you feel like you can't get all your domestic side of things down while also smashing out 40 amazing hours of work, it may be because it's very rare to be able to do those two things together.
So I create gaps in my work day now for doing the sort of the things that I previously would have expected myself to be able to just squeeze into the gaps as though they didn't take any time. But now I recognize that they do take time. Someone's got to do them. I don't have a housewife like that was another world with all kinds of problems in it.
And so I'm just trying to craft a work week that reflects what matters to me and really keeping in mind that idea of like, it's my job to eat a proper lunch. It's my job to go out for a little walk or whatever I need to do. It's also my job to be sort of defending those. boundaries from people who might not know about them or who might know about them but want to encroach on them.
So when you have that really assertive client who insists that you simply must speak to them at 7am on a Tuesday, it's been quite a recent revelation for me that I can and actually should say no to that. And that is like, that's a skill that builds over time. Just recognizing that it is on you to defend your own boundaries and to keep doing it.
Steve Folland: By the way, you really should go and check out Ettie's email. Go to, obviously we'll put a link to it, Fighting Talk. Although I noticed that's also the name of your website. Is it the name of your company or do you go as Ettie Bailey King?
Ettie Bailey-King: It's the name of everything. Yeah. So Fighting Talk is the company. Fighting Talk is the newsletter. Again, am I just, I think I'm just breaking all the rules of content marketing. I'm sure you're not meant to do that. But because my company name feels so important to me and so central to the mission, so Fighting Talk for anyone who doesn't know it, it's a sort of idiom in English of being like spoiling for a fight or ready to take action in a way that might be perceived as aggressive, or it can just be.
Sort of saying that you're really, really ready to make stuff happen. And I use that as a sort of like rallying cry for my business because it's about moving from like meaningless words of which I think there's far too many in the inclusion and accessibility space to being just ready to do whatever it takes to actually make progress on inclusion and accessibility and equity.
And. I always want to keep that reminder in focus for me. So I actually have my own brand logo printed out on top of my computer so I can keep seeing it and keep remembering because it sums up like who I am and how I want to show up in the world. So it's the name of my company. It's the name of the newsletter and I should probably stop there and not call it anything else that I won't be calling my dog that, for example.
Steve Folland: I love having , your logo on top of your computer. I like that. Did you invest in your branding in your website, things like that? Or do you do it yourself?
Ettie Bailey-King: No, it was totally do it myself until about six months ago when I worked with Ellie Perkins from Right and Sunny, who did design me a beautiful new colour palette and slightly reworked the logo. But even at that stage it has never been, yeah, I have, I feel as though before you go freelance there's often this checklist, an imaginary one or a literal one, where people say like, hire a logo designer invest in brand assets and That would obviously be wonderful and so professional and in some sectors that probably will be important, but it also goes to show that you can really DIY it and be working with something that you did just put together in Canva sort of on a whim and then just see how you go with it because it just evolved over time and then got to a point where I was with it.
Almost happy with it. And then Ellie found me new brand colors, which made a massive difference. I'm not sure why that was so impactful for me, but it really changed the way I was thinking about my brand. I had this sort of bold coral color that felt really, really random, and it didn't sum up anything about who I was trying to be and how I was trying to show up.
And then she put together this new color palette and it just, just made sense. So I think you can get there through DIY, you can get there through testing it out and evolving, or you can work with professionals, but you'll probably have a sense and a feeling of what's right for you.
Steve Folland: Yeah, but you got there and did you have photos done as well?
Ettie Bailey-King: I did, yes. I feel like I'm creating a reel at Sarah Tulej well, we can share her website. Is this just me yeah, providing?
Steve Folland: passing it on. It sounds like getting the branding done while she didn't need it to get started Has made you feel differently about your business and the way you're putting yourself out there Which maybe has knock on effects all the way down the chain Into your pricing and all sorts has that You know, the same with the photography as well.
Ettie Bailey-King: Yeah, totally. So I think that investing in the branding and the photography has been a way of expressing what I stand for and has also been a way of, it's like I mentioned earlier about pushing back on what clients might expect from you. An example of this. So for me, I want to be working in an anti oppressive way.
So a lot of how professionals tend to work is not very neuro inclusive, right? We expect people to be able to sit still in a meeting for many hours. We expect them to be able to follow super complex instructions that doesn't work for lots of neurodivergent people, we expect people to come into the office, which can be really exclusionary for many disabled people, tends to harm racially minoritized people as well, who, like, there's just, I could go on.
And my mission, I think, is not only to do that, teach inclusion and accessibility, but to do it in a way that is itself anti oppressive. So I want to be someone who, when you work with me, if you have a ton of caring responsibilities or sort of factors that mean that you need to work in ways that are outside the conventional professional model, I want to be absolutely able to do that and completely flexible to whatever that person needs.
That won't apply for every consultant or every freelancer, by any means, but I wanted to get that across and I feel like my new photos, like, strangely, maybe just because I don't, believe this about myself. I feel like they kind of bring some of that vibe because I asked Sarah, I was like, I want to come across as like warm and approachable and personable and human.
I don't want to come across as like a corporate entity. I mean, I'm just one person, so probably how could I? But yeah, it's allowed me to concretize what I think I stand for and show that visually. And again, it's not going to be the same for every freelancer, but for me that was so important to how I was showing up.
So being able to see that visually has been really validating for me.
Steve Folland: What would you say you've found the most challenging thing about freelancing?
Ettie Bailey-King: What I find most challenging about being freelance is the sense that everything begins and ends with you. And even if you have a support team and I'm now super lucky and I have a VA who works with me for like 10 hours a week. But even with that great support, ultimately it is down to your personal decisions, like whether you say yes to that client who's throwing up red flags, whether you keep working when you know that it's making you ill, how you, yeah, it's, it's just this feeling of kind of like the ultimate responsibility sitting with you.
And I also love that feeling of autonomy and independence and being in control and at its best that is also a perk of being freelance. But it's hard. It's like a heavy burden and it feels really lonely a lot of the time. And if you don't have a good support network of people that you can bring your questions to, like other freelancers, it can get totally overwhelming.
Steve Folland: Yeah, but you've hired a VA. What sort of things do they help you with?
Ettie Bailey-King: Sort of all of the admin, all the practical side of things, basically. So staying on top of my inbox. It's only very recently that I've ever managed to have fewer than 350 unread emails at any given time. So that was worth it alone. And also just like managing calendar, sending out invites for workshops to clients, invoicing and also like automating stuff because I have a really high appetite for wanting all of that kind of thing to be automated and absolutely no patience and no ability to do the small amount of work required to set up like some invoicing software, for example.
So years later, I think, I think she did it all in a couple of hours and I'd been saying I would do it for a good four and a half. No,
Steve Folland: That's just reminded me, actually, I'm now remembered getting your out of office emails as well as I guess part of that, was that something that they introduced or had you been using that as a way to sort of protect you, you know, like when you were talking about boundaries earlier?
Ettie Bailey-King: I'd been experimenting with that for a while. So I learned something from a wonderful former boss, Penny Wilson, at Getting On Board. That's a really great charity if anyone wants to check them out and become a charity trustee. That will probably be my last plug of the podcast. And Penny was so smart about how she used her out of office auto replies.
She would be, if we had a new report, she'd be plugging it saying like, while I've got you here, download our new report. Or are you, do you have this skill, skill set? Are you thinking of volunteering to be a trustee? We'll check out this resource. And I just loved the way she used it as essentially another sort of arm of like the marketing strategy, so I tried to copy it.
A lot of the time I just have I'm out of office. I don't always say when I'm coming back and I do say, you know, sign up for my newsletter while you're here. I think the smart way of using it would be to assert very specific boundaries and to be extremely clear with clients. But actually, sometimes if I've switched it on, it's because I'm like, I'm not feeling it.
I'm having a really slow afternoon. I'm going to go for a walk. Maybe I'll be an hour. Maybe I'll take the afternoon off. We'll see. And so I'll just pop my out of office on and it just gives me that mental space of knowing that if, if a semi urgent request came in, then they wouldn't be sort of left waiting for a reply, but also in the field of comms, I mean, in my experience, there are no emergencies.
I'll, you know, I'll take 45 minutes out and I'm like, my clients are going to be going wild. And I come back and no one's emailed. So sometimes we can think, sometimes we can be a bit more self important than is quite warranted.
Steve Folland: Yeah, that's really great to hear. I did see your newsletter plug in the out of office though, and it does work. So there we go. I thought that was a nice touch.
If you could tell your younger self one thing about being freelance, what would that be?
Ettie Bailey-King: For me, I spent, I spent so long wondering if the downsides would be worth it. And the longer I work for myself, the more intensely I feel the value of owning my own time. So when I first went freelance, I was like, this is pretty nice owning my own time. And the more I take advantage of that, the more I craft like specific days that are only for meetings, specific days that are for work and creativity and sort of getting really tailored and personalized in how I approach yeah, everything from just like what time slots I'll offer a client meeting to when and how I'll think about delivering my work.
Basically, the more I lean into that autonomy, just the more and more rewarding it gets. So I would tell myself - you have the freedom to be whatever kind of freelancer you want. Don't show up in the same way that you did in that job. Don't micromanage yourself when you, you know, quite a lot of us quit our jobs because we're being micromanaged by somebody else.
So I would say take that freedom and run with it and just make a freelancing whatever you want it to be for you.
Steve Folland: Ettie, it's been great to chat to you and all the best being freelance.
Ettie Bailey-King: Thanks so much for having me.
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