#048: From Laid-Off Worker to Six-Figure Freelance Writer

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia. Hey everyone, thank you for joining me for episode 48 of the High Income Business Writing Podcast. My name is Ed Gandia and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to take their writing businesses to the six figure level or the part time equivalent. As a reminder, you can find detailed show notes of this episode by going to b2b launcher.com Episode 48 if you've ever been downsized or laid off, you already know what a crappy experience that can be. I've only gone through this one time before and I was expecting it, but it wasn't fun. It wasn't fun at all. It was emotionally draining, it was taxing. And you know, looking back, it was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. But of course, at the moment I wasn't thinking that way, you know, and it was, it was very difficult. Now, I recently met a very successful freelance writer who went through this just a few years ago and he's been able to build a very successful six figure freelance writing business. His name is Don Sadler and he was laid off from his job in 2009. He had been working as a staff writer, editor and editorial director for several different custom publishing firms up until that point, and some actually very large ones. And he had also been freelancing on the side for several years. But in 2009, when the financial crisis was at its kind of its zenith, if you will, he found himself without a job and was able to pivot very, very quickly and create a very successful, it's become a very successful freelance writing practice. And today he writes content in all different forms. Articles, blogs, website pages, brochures, white papers, video scripts, you name it, and content specifically focus or primarily focused on the business and financial services industries. Now, one of the, I guess there are a couple of big lessons here in this interview that I'm doing here with Don today. One of these are recurring themes in this podcast, but I really want to highlight them here. And I urge you to pay attention to what Don has to share in both of these areas. The first one is to start now. Even if you're happy you're comfortably employed, you think everything's fine, you think there's no urgency. There's a big message here for the importance of starting today. Don't wait. And don't wait until everything's perfect. Right? You guys have heard me say this Many, many times. Start now. Ready, fire, aim. Start taking those steps. Good enough is good enough. Get going and let things unfold. Okay. Start taking action. So that's the big one. The second big important point that you'll that will come out of this interview is to the importance of leveraging your industry knowledge, experience and relationships. It's another really big theme in this podcast. And you'll hear from Don directly as to how these two things enabled him to pivot quickly when the big pink slip was delivered to him and how he's able to create a business that has exceeded what he used to make. Is an employee. And he's having a heck of a time doing it, loving every minute of it. Anyway, I think you're going to walk away with some great ideas and insights. And even if you've been doing this for a while, I urge you to listen to Don's message. He's got some great ideas and some inspiration for freelance writers at all different levels. So let's get to the interview and I'll come back to you at the end. Hey, Don, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.

Thanks, Ed. Good to be here, man.

Well, you know, we're talking a little bit before the show here about how excited I am to be talking with someone who had kind of a similar path than I did. Right. You started part time, you're moonlighting for a while. He transitioned. You're a very successful full time freelance writer today and I don't want to steal your spotlight. I want you to tell us and take your time with this because this is important that people hear your story. Tell us about how you got started. Tell us about yourself, what you do today. Bring it on.

Sure. Good. All right. Again, my name is Don Sadler. I'm a full time commercial freelance writer. I specialize in a couple of niches, business and finance. That's been one of the keys to my success, but I'll talk more about that later. I started my professional career in 1985 working for a newsletter publishing company and worked there from 97 until 2005 when that company was bought by another very big custom publishing company. Kind of the gorilla in the industry. They bought the small company that I worked for in Atlanta in 2005 and I worked for them until 2009. That's when I got the dreaded layoff call that most people dread. And it's certainly not something that I was looking forward to. But the good news is that I of saw that call. I kind of saw that layoff coming at least six months in advance. And so I had started to prepare myself mentally and emotionally for what I was going to do when that happened. When that did happen, at 4 o' clock on a Friday, which is by the corporate textbook, by the way, I was ready to go ahead and give full time freelancing a shot. I had gotten myself mentally and emotionally prepared for it. So I gave it a go right from day one. And. But the real key to what enabled me to launch my freelance business right out of the gate is the fact that I started freelancing on the side as soon as we moved to Atlanta in 1997.

So you moved to Atlanta in 1997. You've been. So you had been freelancing on the side for a long time?

Yes, yes, for. Well, from 97 until 2009.

Wow.

So for a good. What's that, 12 years?

Yeah. Yeah. I didn't realize it had been that long. So tell me a little bit about. Because, you know, I. I moonlighted for about three years total and I thought it was insane. I mean, I had taken it to a point where I just couldn't, I couldn't keep that up. How do you, how were you able to maintain your sanity and control your, your workload after 12 years? You're very well known. I mean. Well, it happened.

Let me tell you a little bit about how I got started freelancing in the first place. When we moved to Atlanta in 1997. During the first few months that we lived here, I went to a Public Relations Society of America luncheon that a PR person who I knew invited me to. And it just so happened that the luncheon that day was a panel of three Atlanta magazine editors, one of whom was the editor of Business to Business magazine, which was a brand new Atlanta specific business magazine that had just launched in 1997. So I went up to him afterwards, introduced myself, told him I was new in town, I was a business writer and I was looking to start doing some freelance work. To my surprise, he said, sounds good. Send me a couple of samples and we'll see if we can get you something. Sure enough, I did. He got me an assignment right away. I did a good job on it and he started sending me. Basically I got a couple of different columns and departments in the magazine. I had an article every month that I wrote for Business to Business magazine and that was my very first freelance job. Another thing that surprised me was that once I got that job under my belt, in addition to my full time job, which was also as A business editor and writer. So they really flowed well together. I was able to take what I did in my 9 to 5 job and parlay that into freelance work, at least in terms of kind of doing the same thing, focused on the same content area, doing the same kinds of writings, and kind of being plugged into the same areas. So it all kind of played off of each other. And like I was saying, it surprised me how easy it was to start landing new freelance clients once I had a couple under my belt.

Yeah. And, you know, I remember that magazine, too.

I thought you probably would. Yeah.

I remember it because I moved here in the late 90s and I remember when they launch. In fact, the reason I know it is the owner, the founder of the publication was the. It was a lady, right?

Yes, it was. Right.

And she.

I'm drawing a blank on her name.

Yes, she was the girlfriend of the CEO of the company that my wife was working for and had associates.

Interesting, interesting. So that's Tim Darnell, by the way, was the first editor listening. Shout out to Tim.

Yeah, yeah, that name sounds real, real familiar. So, all right, so you're kind of a fluke thing, but you know what people say. Oh, yeah, but that doesn't happen today. But you know what? There are other opportunities today. The whole point, I think the lesson learned is that you just took a chance. You know, you went out there, you got out there, you know, you don't know where these things are going to come from, but you were smart enough to just get out there and talk to people and see what would come out of it. And then you were also doing this in your day job. And. Right. You were able to. It was complementary in a way.

It was very complimentary. I mean, literally, I spent nine to five every day writing, editing, researching business topics, and then I would turn right around and write business articles for B2B magazine in the evenings and on the weekends during my spare time. And. And all of that kind of led to other opportunities. I was fortunate in that what I did during my 9 to 5 job tended to open doors of opportunity for freelance clients as well. Now, I wasn't poaching on my employer's clients, not by any stretch of the imagination, but just as I was researching and talking to people and doing different things, little opportunities would come up. But that's probably a lesson worth sharing right there. And that is that to always keep your eyes and ears open for opportunities. I. Once I got myself into a freelance state of mind, I was always looking for freelance opportunities and clients and projects and things like that, given what I did during my 9 to 5, really kind of gave me lots of opportunities because I was looking for them.

So tell me about that. Give me some examples of some of your next couple of sets of clients. How did they come about?

Great, great. Okay, so here's a perfect example. One of my clients with my former employer was a very large bank here in the Southeast and ended up having me interview someone at a commercial finance company who they were kind of partners with in terms of providing different kinds of financing that banks don't usually do. It's called factoring and asset based lending. If you know anything about that. In the course of working with the guy at the finance company on an article for my client's publication, he said, hey, you get this stuff. You seem to understand factoring in asset based lending. We've been looking for a writer who can help us with our monthly newsletter. Would you be interested in that? I said, sure. I ended up working for them on a freelance basis writing their monthly newsletter as well as other different writing projects that would come up for them. They became probably my second or third freelance client and they had regular work for me on a consistent basis. He was one of the first people that I called when I went full time freelance and told him that what I was doing, that I was now a full time freelancer and their offices happen to be here in Atlanta. He said, hey, come on down, let's talk about some more stuff that we can do together. He ended up hiring me on a retainer basis to do all of their writing and communications work for them. And they are my client to this day. I've been on a retainer basis with them, on a monthly retainer basis with them since my second or third month of freelancing. And that specific client came about because I was doing work for my former employer and. And he asked me if I could help with them with their writing needs. And that's what that led to.

So this is somebody who approached you. I'm wondering, did you, let's say during your first three or four years, did you do any kind of outbound prospecting where you were purposely and proactively reaching out to prospective clients?

No, I did not. I just kept my eyes and ears open for opportunities that. That again, just kind of tended to come up because I was looking for them in the course of my. Of my 9 to 5 job.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think there's something to be said about the. When you have a steady paycheck and you don't really have a short time horizon. Right. I mean, I shouldn't assume anything. At the time. Did you think that you were going to be turning this into a full time business anytime soon or was it really more for. For supplementary income?

I did not anticipate turning it into full time business anytime soon. That's a great question. I did it for two or three reasons. Number one was, as you said, supplementary income. I kind of considered it my mad money. At my peak, I was probably making between 1,000 and $2,000 a month in freelance money. So that's pretty good mad money side income for sure. So the income was great. But the second reason, and really as big a reason as the income, was just the personal satisfaction that I got out of it. I found that I actually have an entrepreneurial bent to me. I really didn't realize that. I really hadn't given it much thought, but the whole process of getting clients, getting clients of my own, doing work for them, doing good work for them, having them be pleased with my work, and then having them pay me for that really was really satisfying. I really got a charge out of it. That's not something that I really expected. But after I had been doing it for a couple of years, I realized that, hey, I've got a little bit of entrepreneur in me. This is after having been a full time employee since 1985. So I'd spent my entire life in the corporate world, getting a paycheck, all that stuff, and was perfectly comfortable with that. But I found that I had a little bit of entrepreneur in me. Just the personal satisfaction I got out of doing my side business. Having my side business was very satisfying.

Well, I've seen this before where people do it just because it's fun. Of course the income is great. They don't really have the pressure of I got to pay the mortgage in a few weeks.

Exactly. Yeah, it was mad money. It wasn't paying the bills money, which takes all the pressure off.

It does, and it changes the dynamics. And I think there's something to be said about the results that come out of that kind of relaxed state of just being and running your business. Because I've seen the other side of that, which is again, the high pressure. Oh my gosh. And I got to bring business in like now and it's a downward spiral of just bad stuff.

Yes. Stress, pressure, anxiety, sleeplessness.

And that turns off prospective clients. I mean, they smell the fear, they smell the anxiety. So, okay, see, what point was there a point when you realized, wow, this is not only steady, but it's really growing. Anytime before 2009.

Yes. When you give it some thought, there definitely was. And in fact, it's one of those things that you can kind of look back on when you've gotten to where I am now. And you can look back and see the things that led you to where you are right now. One of those. And I distinctly remember this was having dinner with my wife and just talking about stuff. I said, hey, you might not realize it, but I'm really starting to build my little freelance business here and I'm up to such and such amount of income and that's based on this number of freelance clients that I have right now. And I've been thinking about it and I've been thinking that if I didn't have this full time job that I spent nine to five every day working, but if I instead devoted that time to my own freelance business, I really think I could make a go of this. I really think I could build this up and replace my salary and maybe even exceed it at some point. She kind of looked at me like I was crazy and I certainly understand that. And at the time I was really just dreaming. I really didn't have a plan in my mind that that's something that I was going to do. But I had started to think about it. I had started to think that it's something that I think I could do if the circumstance were to present itself. Do you want to fast forward to how that circumstance presented itself?

Yeah, tell me again.

Had been working for a very large custom publishing company starting in 2005 when they acquired the small business that I worked for here in Atlant and specialized in the business and financial side. Most of my clients that I wrote and edited custom publications for were financial institutions. Well, I don't have to tell the audience about what happened to the financial services world after 2008. The new business in my niche, the financial services niche, just really ground to a screeching halt at my company. There wasn't any new business coming in. The clients that we did have in the financial services realm were kind of slowly dropping off one by one. And I could see the handwriting on the wall probably in early 2008, I could see that it probably wasn't a matter of if, but when. They were going to have to let me go just because they couldn't afford to keep paying me anymore. It just didn't make any sense. Again, having seen that handwriting on the wall when I got the layoff call the first week of January in 2009, I wasn't surprised. Now again, I had been an employee for 24 years, had never gotten fired or laid off from a job. So even though I kind of anticipated it, it didn't make it any easier. It was not a pleasant call, it was not a pleasant afternoon, and it was a pretty scary weekend. But the thing that gave me an incredible amount of encouragement, and again, this just ties back to the importance of starting freelance work on the side Long before you think you want to start your own freelance business is the fact that as soon as I got off the phone from my layoff call, because I worked as a remote employee from home, my employer was located in upstate New York. So they did the layoff over the phone, which I understood as soon as I got off the phone from them. I fired off emails to two of my freelance clients, told them that I had just gotten laid off and I was available for as much work as they could send me. I had heard from both of them before the end of the day on Friday saying they would have work for me first thing Monday morning. And they did. And so I started my very first day of full time self employment with paying work. And I've had paying work every day since.

Oh, that's great. That's great. Did you ever imagine when you were doing this that this is a good insurance policy?

Yeah, I guess. I mean, I guess I never really thought of it that way. Like I said, my reasons for freelancing were a little side income and a lot of personal satisfaction. But as I began to realize that it wasn't a matter of if, but when, that I was going to get laid off, that's when I started thinking about what I was going to do. Because frankly, I had worked for this company for a long enough time and had risen up the ranks, so to speak, to a level that I was earning a salary that I knew would be very difficult for me to just go find another job that would replace that salary. So I knew that my best chance of getting back to my salary level, if not exceeding it, was to go freelance instead of look for another job.

Yeah, well, and I only ask that question because that's something a lot of people don't think about. I talk to a lot of new and aspiring freelance writers who are looking at it as a very definite career move. They're looking to make the transition. They want to do this and they're either working right now, they're not. Doesn't really matter. It's like a black or white scenario. And I say, look, there's a third option here which could be kind of like what you did, just start now anyway. Even if you're happy in your job and you're a perfect example of someone who's perfectly happy, right. Their full time job. Because if anything, you know, it's a mad money. It's, you know, you could store away some more money, right. Start saving a little more.

Right.

And it's an insurance policy. And what it does is it buys you, I've seen people do this, it buys you so much freedom and it buys you some guts. You know, you can be a little bit bolder in your, in your full time job, maybe make better decisions, bolder decisions when you know you got something that's, that's already starting to crank out some, some pesos, right?

And certainly it was a long ways from $1,000, maybe $2,000 a month to replacing my former salary. But having that as a base, as a starting point was just invaluable in terms of getting off the ground. And I've told people this before, the best analogy that I can think of is like a snowball rolling down a hill. Once you get the ball rolling, it just starts picking up speed, it starts picking up momentum. And I found, just like I thought was going to be the case when I had all day, every day to devote to my own business instead of working for somebody else, the results just blew me away. I had all day, every day to look for my own clients, to do work for my own clients. All of the mental and emotional energy and time and everything that went into working for somebody else's business was now going into working for my own business. It was much easier to work late hours. I mean, I didn't mind working past five, you know, I wasn't looking at the watch and oh, it's five o', clock, it's time to, time to turn off the computer or whatever, you know, I mean, that just, that becomes a non issue. You know, working on Saturday, no big deal. It was because it was for my business, it wasn't for somebody else.

Yeah, that really changes things. So let's want to transition a little bit here and get into the success you've achieved since then because you're a very successful guy. And I know that listeners would be very interested to hear how you've been able to take it from a side gig to a very lucrative freelance business. So if you don't mind maybe kind of giving us an idea of where you are today in terms of income range or I don't know how comfortable you are talking about that.

Sure. I was able to replace my old salary by the end of my first year of full time self employment. In fact, as a self employed person you tend to gauge your income on a monthly basis. And so monthly I was exceeding my old salary by the end of my first full year of full time self employment. My annual income for my first full year was about 80% of my old salary. So I was able to get up to my old salary level really, really quickly. My second full full time, or pardon me, my second full year of self employment I exceeded six figures and my income has grown every year since then.

That's fantastic. That's fantastic. So let's get into the whole peaks and valleys of income because I know this is a question that comes up quite a bit and especially kind of early on. Even though you've been doing this for a long time, it's, it's still a huge shift. Now you're full time and it happened overnight. Tell us a little bit about some of the things that you've done because your income is pretty stable these days.

Yes. And that's, I mean that's anybody out there who's trying to make a go of it. As a full time self employed person, you know that avoiding income peaks and valleys, trying to get some level of stability in your monthly income is the key not only to paying your bills but to sleeping at night. So that's a huge challenge. I'm going to share some keys to that. It's fairly obvious, but I'm going to state it anyway and I'll try to talk about some ways that I've been able to achieve that. The thing that's fairly obvious is that ongoing steady clients are better than one off clients. Now everybody knows that, right? So the key is, okay, how do I get those ongoing steady clients? One example, like I was talking about earlier is the commercial finance company who my second full month of self employment hired me on a monthly retainer basis at $600 a month. Okay, well, I mean that's not going to pay the mortgage, but hey, it's a start. It's $600 every month that I know that I'm going to get for doing a certain amount of work for that client each month. And again, like I said, I've had that client since my second full month of self employment. So if you can, there's one example is getting a client to hire you on retainer. Retainers are tricky. I don't want to get into the details there, but in whatever way, whatever kind of compensation arrangement you want to make, that makes you and your client comfortable for you to do a certain amount of work for them every month for a certain amount of money. So that would be one example. I came out of the custom publishing world not sure how much readers, pardon me, listeners, know about custom publishing, but it's basically newsletters. Many magazines. Of course now a lot of custom publishing content is done online that institutions and companies pay publishers for to build brand awareness is basically what custom publishing is. But custom publishing is all about producing content on a regular, consistent basis. So I've been able to kind of take that model that I saw work for companies that I worked for for 24 years and make it work for myself as a self employed person by landing clients who hire me to do ongoing projects. Newsletters are the best example. Most companies, especially large companies, financial institutions, for example, produce some kind of newsletter on a company consistent basis, quarterly, minimum, sometimes bimonthly, sometimes as often as monthly. And if you can get a client to hire you to produce an ongoing newsletter, that is the holy grail of ongoing, consistent, steady work. Right now I write two quarterly newsletters for one client, a quarterly newsletter for another one, and a bimonthly, a quarterly and a bimonthly newsletter for another one. And then I've got a handful of clients who I write web content for, mostly blogs and bylined articles, ghostwriting those articles. And I have several clients who I write weekly articles for along those lines because they're striving for search engine optimization. The search engines nowadays are able to distinguish between junk content and good content. And so companies that are really on the cutting edge of SEO realize that they have to have good quality, consistent content published on a regular basis in order to be search engine friendly. Especially financial services companies who need quality content written by somebody who understands the financial services niche are turning to writers like me to provide that. And they need it on a consistent basis. So I'm writing it on a weekly basis for several of my clients. So regular, ongoing newsletters, regular blogs, and ghostwritten articles that need to be published on a consistent basis. Those are two good examples of getting clients to hire you for ongoing work instead of one off projects.

Now a couple of questions there, and we don't have to get into all the projects, but I'm curious about once more specific type. What would you say is a range in your niche for newsletters in terms of fees? Average.

$2,000 to write a four page newsletter quarterly.

Gotcha. And it's four pages. It's usually going to be online. Correct.

Print and online.

Print, online. Okay. So it's good money. You know, you're talking about several clients. Some of them have more than one. Some of them also. It sounds like some of these opportunities led to. Oh, what about, you know, our blog? Can you help us with that? And you know, this other thing. Right. So it starts growing. Tell us a little bit about how you found those opportunities. Right. Because it's, you don't just say, well, listen, I only work with clients who have, you know, this kind of need. Right. So you kind of have to really get a feel when you're qualifying the prospect.

Yes.

For what the ongoing need might be and, or the possibility to grow. Tell us a little bit about how you evaluate a prospect.

Well, I mean, what I'm going to say doesn't have application for probably a whole lot of people. And that's because I've been very fortunate in that I've been working in the same industry for going on 30 years now. So I have a really tight niche. I really understand the financial services and business industries. I've written about the products and the issues for so long that I can literally write a lot of the stuff in my sleep. I tend to write about the same topics over and over and over again so I don't have to reinvent the wheel from scratch every time with a new assignment. But I say all of that also to say that because I've been in the industry for a long time. I know a lot of people, I know a lot of institutions. Several of my, my best clients right now came directly out of my prior job just because they're people that I knew. I stayed in touch with them. They contacted me when they knew that I was full time freelance because they knew that I could do the kind of work that they needed. For me personally, a big part of it is just having been in the industry for a long time, having a lot of contacts and kind of knowing how it works. I know that doesn't help everybody out there because everybody doesn't have, you know, the benefit of 30 years of experience in an industry. But that's, that's been the key for me.

But you know what though, I'm glad you mentioned that because sure, maybe not everyone has 30 years, but I would say that most people have something they can leverage, but they're not paying attention. They don't realize that really their biggest and best wins are going to come from their personal and professional network.

Exactly. I mean, you have such a Better chance of landing a new client if it's somebody who knows you. I mean, that's, you know, half the battle, if not more. If they know you, they're going to, you know, you're going to get an audience with them, they're going to listen to you. And really, if you don't screw it up, you're probably going to get it.

Tell me a little bit about your work today. Does it still. Would you say that most of your new clients, and I get the impression that you don't get a lot of new clients every year because you're going to deeper into each account. So it seems like your clients are very stable. But when you do sign on and bring on a new client, where are they coming from? How are you finding them?

Two things. The first is the search engine optimization work that I did on my website. That was a game changer for me. About two and a half, maybe three years ago, the light bulb went off. I was doing SEO copywriting for clients. Of course, I had my own website, which I had built when I first went self employed. It was okay, it was fine. It wasn't anything fancy. It was basically just a place to send people and say, here's my website, learn a little bit about me and view some samples of work. I just had one of those light bulb moments. I'm doing SEO copywriting for clients. Why haven't I done it to my own site? So I went in, I rewrote my website, mainly just my homepage copy for SEO. And anybody who's listening knows what SEO copywriting is. You might not know how to do it or know all the details of how to do it, but you know what it is, you should know what it is. I went in, I knew enough about SEO copywriting to rewrite my homepage for SEO purposes. It was like turning on the faucet. I mean, literally within a couple of weeks, I started getting leads, qualified leads, good leads from people looking for my kind of writing. And it hasn't stopped since. There are weeks when I get more leads than I can almost reply to from people who've done a keyword search looking for my kind of freelance writing, finding me and contacting me to see if I can help them with projects.

That's great. That's great. I would add that big reason that probably happened is not only the great work that you did there, but the fact that, like you said, you worked in a narrowly niched industry.

Yeah, that's huge.

I mean, just optimizing for freelance copywriter.

Absolutely. You're not going any your competition. I spoke at a freelance forum meeting here in Atlanta a couple of weeks ago, and I use the analogy when it comes to niche freelancing versus general freelancing. I've heard debates and I've read debates on which is better. I come down very, very strongly on the side of being a niche freelancer because it's worked really well for me. I've got a couple of good niches, but perhaps there's a lot of reasons. But one of the reasons is exactly what we're talking about. By being a niche freelancer, you can SEO your website copy. You really can't do it if you're a generalist. As Ed was saying, if you try to place on the first page for freelance writer or freelance copywriter, good luck to you. Even Atlanta freelance writer is going to be very difficult and very competitive. But if you can concentrate on a niche like I've done with freelance business writing and freelance financial writing, that gives you a much, much stronger chance of. Of ranking high in SEO.

So I want to talk a little bit more about developing. I call it a niche because, you know, I got my business partners, or they were all Canadian. My VP of operations is Canadian. They say niche over there. It's kind of rubbed off on me.

Niche, niche.

But I want to go there. But before we go there, I do want to ask you any tips or ideas on how once you're inside a new account, now, once you're working with a client, they contacted you for one specific thing at least that was kind of the immediate need. Any ideas on how you can explore other opportunities with that client? Give them ideas on other things they could leverage you for?

Well, I mean, I can share an example of how one of my clients has enabled me doing a good job for one client within a very large institution has enabled me to spread out very, very broadly within that institution. It's a very large bank, one of the largest banks in the country, and I had been doing newsletter writing for them for a number of years and had done a good job for them. It was a steady, ongoing client. And my contact said, hey, can you also work in another. And all these niches were within business and finance. So you can niche really, really deep if you want to. But anyway, within the very broad realm of business and finances, he said, hey, can you also write about merchant services? I said, well, yeah, I can write about merchant services. He says, okay, I'm going to refer you to such and such. They need help with their merchant services website copy. Oh, and can you write about another niche within a niche? I can't remember what it was. I said, yes, I can do that too. So he ended up referring me to two or three different colleagues. And these are all bank marketing people and they're always looking for good outsourced writing help because they don't have the staff internally to do all the writing that has to be done in terms of website copy, newsletters, ghost written articles, that kind of stuff. There's so much content generated by these big institutions, these big banks that they're constantly looking for freelancers like us who can do that work for them. Anyway, he referred me to two or three different people within the bank. So right now I'm writing for. Gosh, I've lost count. Probably at least four different areas, Four different niche areas, departments within one bank. Needless to say, they're one of, if not my biggest clients. But how did I get that? I guess I got it because I did get a good job for one person and he referred me to other people. I mean, I didn't even ask him. He just, you know, he just knew that I was doing a good job on his project and that I could probably help out other marketing people within the bank who he knew.

You know, I've encountered the same thing. I think this is. It really points to the fact that, well, first of all the clearing a niche and then also doing great work for your client. I mean, that goes without saying, but what starts happening is when you're really good and you're narrowly focused. I know a lot of people out there don't believe me, but you tell me, Don, if I'm accurate in this statement, they are so happy to finally found someone who's easy to work with, dependable, produces great work on time every time, and gets their business and their customers. They're happy to introduce you to other people.

They're happy to introduce you to other people and they're happy to pay your rates.

Yes. Right. So I'm not crazy, right?

No, definitely not here.

This whole time I just thought that I was gifted.

No, I mean, put yourself in your client's shoes. When they're looking for outsourced help, they're looking for someone who can do the job, who doesn't need a lot of hand holding, who's not going to have to rework the job over and over again, who's fun and pleasant to work with. I mean, don't discount that. This is one of the things I talked about at the freelance forum meeting as well. Be the freelancer that your client wants to hire, be the person who's personable, who's fun, who somebody wants to pick up the phone and talk to, not somebody who's difficult to work with.

You know, it is funny because I talk to other freelancers all the time, and, gosh, I hire freelancers to do all kinds of different things, and I don't want to point fingers, but it was a couple months ago, I was talking to another freelancer, and he just sounded so depressed. And he did great work. I mean, I was looking at his website. It just did great work. This is a designer. And it just. It was. It was tough. It was very difficult to talk to him and have a conversation because. And I'm sure it was just. I don't know. I don't know what happened. I shouldn't assume anything, but I don't know if I really want to work with someone for probably two or three months because this was a big project that it was really that difficult to just talk to. And so a lot of it is chemistry, right?

Yeah. And I've got another. I've got a personal story to share there as well, Ed. Last year, for this particular bank client that I'm talking about, I was part of a copywriter team. Actually consisted of me and one other writer. But it was a very large team. It was a very large web content project. They were building a portal with just dozens and dozens of content pieces, articles, white papers, case studies, you name it. Really big project. And they had hired me and one other freelance writer to do most of the writing. And. And so we would have weekly conference calls with everybody on the team. And there were probably four and five people at the bank and four and five people at the Demand Generation Agency that was spearheading the project. So we'd have 10 or 12 people on these weekly conference calls just to kind of keep everybody up to date on what's going on. The other freelancer, I just noticed things about the way that he would ask questions, the way that he would respond to questions. And it wasn't blatantly. I mean, he certainly wasn't being rude, and he wasn't really being that difficult. But I would just notice the way that he would interact with the client and even tone of voice sometimes. And they were just little things that I picked up on that I thought, you know what if I were the client, I'm not sure I would really want to work with him just because he's not making things as easy as possible. That's another thing make things as easy as possible on your client. Here's one. Don't ask stupid questions. I know people say, oh, no question is a dumb question, but you know what? That's not true. There are dumb questions and clients don't appreciate that. They'll answer your question and they'll be polite, but deep down inside they're probably thinking, that was kind of a dumb question. You should have either known the answer to that or figured it out on your own instead of bothering me with it. All of that is to say, make it as easy on your client as possible. Again, these are just my personal observations. I frankly never shared that with anybody. Maybe I shouldn't have here, but just some things that I had noticed in terms of another freelancer who I didn't think really made things as easy on the client as he possibly could have.

Yeah, and just to emphasize a key point here, this is not about a personality. I don't want anyone to say, yeah, but I'm not type A. It's not about type A. Type B. This is about being easy to work with.

Exactly. Exactly.

Okay, so let's switch gears to. Because I know one thing you're really good at is. And I can see that now because you talked about how you have that entrepreneurial streak in you. You've done a really good job of increasing, improving your productivity, which of course drives your internal billing rate. And you're very mindful of that. Tell us a little bit about how you measure that and what things you've done to make more for every hour you put into your business.

Sure. Yeah. I shared this at the meeting last week as well. And this is something that occurred to me about six months into my full time freelance writing business. I realized that as a self employed professional, freelance writer, of course, but really any self employed professional who provides a service, your inventory is your time. Ask any manufacturer or retailer, how important is it to track your inventory? Well, gee, it's very important. I mean, your inventory is your business. So when I realized that my inventory is my time and I wasn't keeping track of it, that was another light bulb moment for me from that day. Starting on that day, about six months into my business and to this day, and as far as I'm concerned, for as long as I run a freelance business, I will keep track of my time every single workday of the week. I'm not obsessive about it. I track it in 15 minute increments. Not by the minute or not even by five minutes. I don't go nuts with It, I keep it approximately, but at the end I keep a timesheet and it's a very simple Microsoft Word document that I created. I'm not a high tech guy and I'm not an Excel guy, that's for sure. I hate that program. A financial guy hates Excel first. Yeah, it's a simple Microsoft Word document. I track the projects that I worked on for the day, how much time I spent on them, and how much money I made. Now, of course, there are long term projects that can't be summed up as easily as two hours on this project build X amount of money, so I keep it approximate. But at the end of every day, I know how many hours I spent on which projects and how much money I earned. I cannot overemphasize how important that is in terms of goal setting from both a productivity and an income standpoint and just knowing where your time goes, like I said, during those first six months when I wasn't tracking my time and income, I just kind of felt like I didn't know. I mean, I knew I was working and I knew I was sending out invoices and I was collecting and depositing checks and all of that was good, but I didn't feel like I had a handle on it. So just the simple process of tracking my time and tracking my income every day has been one of, if not the most important things that I've done.

Wow. Wow. It's. That's key. I, I'm with you 100%. I know for me, you know what, one thing that it gave me is a target and it showed me about was improving or not. And it started making the, the, the internal rates that I was shooting for more realistic or more real to me, not realistic, more real to me. More doable. Because I remember when somebody told me and there's no reason why you shouldn't be making $150 an hour or more. This is when I was getting started, I thought, well, there's just no way. That just seems so crazy. But as I started working on my productivity and tracking stuff better in working, doing a lot of things, you mentioned where I was working for the same clients doing more work. So I was becoming much more efficient and I just knew the stuff. I saw my rate go up way past the $200 an hour mark.

Right.

And then that was my new reality. So to me, you know, it got to a point where anything under 250 was, you know, something was wrong.

Exactly. And I'm in the same boat, Ed. If I'm not. I mean, if I'm not earning a hundred dollars an hour on something, then I'm totally wasting my time. Preferably I'm in the 150 to 200 an hour and up on most of the work that I'm doing. Now this parlays into another topic, and I don't know how much time you want to spend talking about it, but hourly versus project pricing.

Yeah, give us your take on that.

No freelance writer is going to go out and charge $150 and up per hour for work. But if you price your work on a project basis, then you can earn as much as you want per hour, because it depends on how fast you do the work. And so when you have a profitable niche like financial services, where you can charge relatively high rates for your work and complete it very efficiently and very quickly, then internally you can earn $200 an hour or more. Now, are you going to quote your client a price of $200 an hour? Of course not. You quote them a project price, they don't know how long it takes you. Frankly, they don't care how long it takes you. All they care is that you complete the work on time and that you do a good job. If you do that, they don't care if you an hour. I'm a strong proponent of project instead of hourly pricing, because when you price on a project basis, your hourly income is almost unlimited. But again, getting back to the time and the income tracking, the only way to know how much you're making internally on all your work is to keep track of your time and your income.

I'll add something to that, Don, which is kind of a paradox in that the more you do for a client, so the more work, the more people you're working with inside that organization. Like your biggest client as an example, not only does your internal hourly rate go way up for that client and overall, but in a way, they need you more than ever. The more you know about them, the more they need you because they cannot afford to let you go and start from scratch with somebody else.

Right, Exactly.

Now, of course, there's a lot of responsibility that comes along with that. I'm not talking about abusing that, but I'm talking about the freedom that gives you to really kind of run a very different type of business. Right. Because you have more choices now. You can choose to kind of scale back your hours if you wanted to, at least temporarily or really, of course, just keep them the same and earn a heck of a lot more.

Right.

So there are A lot of side benefits to doing what you just described. I couldn't agree more with you.

And another thing is I was thinking about, because I really, this is one of the things that I'll get up on my soapbox and yell and scream about and I get kind of passionate about it. And again, I was talking about it as the meeting a couple of weeks ago. And it occurred to me that when you price by the hour, you've set a limit. You've set a limit on how much money you can earn because if you can bill out eight hours a day, that's phenomenal. It's almost impossible to bill out eight hours a day because there's other aspects of running your business that aren't just paying client work. But let's say that you can bill out eight hours a day, which is probably the best anyone could ever do, if that. And let's say that you can bill at a rate of $100 an hour. Very few freelance writers, I think would be able to bill at $100 an hour. But let's just say $100 an hour to keep the math simple. And you're billing at eight hours a day. That's $800 a day. Now that's good. $800 a day. Eight times five is $3,500 a week. That's really good income. That's going to put you well into the six figure range, but that's the most you're ever going to make. You're never going to make more than that $800 a day. A few weeks ago I had a client project. It was a rush job. They needed it very quickly. It was very niche content, fairly sophisticated content. And the client turned to me. This is the same bank that I've been talking about. They turned to me to do it because they knew I could do it. They knew I could do it quickly and that it wouldn't require any rewriting on their end and, and it would be a no fuss, no muss project. I knew all of these things. So they asked me for my rate and I said $1,500. The client's reply was thank you, exclamation point. They were thrilled to pay me $1,500 to do this project that they knew they would get on time and they knew it would be what they needed it to be. It took me about four hours. So do the math. That's close to $400 an hour. It's $1,500 in a day. Now again, that's not typical that's probably set the record in terms of my highest profitability productivity project. But that's just an example of what you can earn when you're pricing on a project basis. When you know your client, when you know what they can afford to pay, when you know what the project is worth to them, not what your time is worth to you. It's a matter of what's the project worth to your client. When you start thinking that way, instead of what is my time worth to me and how much should I bill on an hourly basis, that's when your income can really go through the roof.

Where are you thinking about taking your business? If you look ahead in the next three, five years, what do you see?

Wow, that's a great question, Ed. You didn't prepare me for that question.

See that? I got to throw one in there.

Right now, I'm just trying to keep up with the projects that I have, the clients that I have, and get everything out on time. Looking down the road, I suppose I could get to the point where I would become more of a project manager, so to speak. I would start sending writing jobs out to a team of writers. Of course, taking a cut of each one of those, that's the way to grow your business exponentially. Logically, it makes sense at some point down the road. But frankly, I enjoy what I'm doing now. I love writing. I'm incredibly blessed to be able to spend all day, every day in my professional career doing something that I really enjoy doing. So I'm in no hurry to start handing off projects or doing more project managing or anything like that. Right now, I'm just enjoying doing what I'm doing, enjoying doing a lot of writing and pleasing my clients.

And, you know, there's nothing wrong with that. I think that's excellent. A lot of people feel that, well, what's the next thing? What's the next thing? What's the next thing? It doesn't have to be a next thing. This is not a race. And I'd say in many cases, it does make sense. I mean, I'm kind of wired in a way that after every five years or so, I get an itch to start a new project. But, you know, that's. That's a personality thing, and it's got to make sense, right? I don't just go with the urge. It's got to make a lot of sense. In many times, it starts out as a hobby, you know, as an experiment. So I kind of limit the time and resources I spend. But gosh, you know, there's nothing wrong with, you know, staying where you are and enjoying your work because the moment you start shifting it and growing a different type of business, there's a different set of challenges that come with that.

I've given some thought ed to entering the world where you live, the world of writing books, getting books published, doing training, consulting, the kind of work that you do. That's certainly one route that I could go down the road and share the kind of things that I'm sharing here. You know, on a one on one training basis with clients, who knows, maybe write a book like you and Peter Bowerman have done. Although you guys have kind of got the market cornered, there's serious competition.

Everyone has a different story to tell and everyone has different ideas, insights and ways of doing it. And it's not so much about the market being cornered. I actually think there's room for a lot of people in any market. So man, that would be awesome. I think you'd be a great teacher.

Well, thanks. And I enjoy teaching. I enjoy speaking with you in an interview like this. I enjoy speaking before a group of other freelancers and kind of sharing some of my thoughts and insights as hopefully you guys can tell. I can get pretty passionate about this and I just would like to do more opportunities to to help other new freelancers kind of learn some of the lessons that I've learned and put some of these tricks into practice to help grow their businesses as well.

Well, so where can listeners learn more about you? Give us your website.

Sure.

How they can connect with you.

My website is www.donsadlerwriter.com that's Don S A D L E R writer.com youm can go there. You can see an example. Take a look at my homepage and I'll give you one guess and it pro won't need to to figure out the keywords and keyword phrases that I optimized on my homepage that have resulted in me ranking very high on the first page, usually number two or number three at the lowest for my keyword search terms. If you go take a look at my homepage, you'll easily quickly see what those search terms are and that might give you some tips to write your own website copy for whatever your niche is to be able to rank high in the search engines. You can also sign up for my monthly newsletter. That was one thing I wanted to talk about that we didn't get to. The other marketing thing that I do is I send out a monthly e newsletter on all different kinds of content marketing, writing, marketing, those kinds of things. You can sign up for my monthly E newsletter. I also publish it as a blog on my website and you'll see all of my past issues listed there on the right hand side. And so take a look at that.

Awesome. Well Don, thanks so much for sharing all this with us. I really appreciate it. It's. This is not only informative, but very inspiring. So, so thanks for taking the time today.

Good. Thanks. I enjoyed it.

Well folks, I hope you enjoyed that interview and I wanted to remind you that you can find the details show notes for this episode@b2b launcher.com forward/episode48 I had a couple of announcements for you before we sign off. One is the fact that we're going to go to a bi weekly format here at the High Income Business Writing Podcast. And by that I mean we're going to start publishing every other week instead of every week. Some of you might know that I have another podcast that I recently launched called the A Smarter Freelancing Podcast in that podcast is already in a bi weekly format. So here's the plan because many of you are subscribed to both of them. I'm going to be publishing the High Income Business Writing Podcast one week and then Smarter Freelancing the following week. So that way there's always a podcast, a new show every week, and I don't overload you with content, which is one of the things that I'm trying to avoid here. I want to give you great information, but I don't want to overwhelm you either. So if you don't know about my Smarter Freelancing podcast, you can check that out@smarter freelancing.com so that brings us to the end of the episode. I am your host, Ed Gandia. Thank you so much for listening and I hope you have an awesome day.

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