#069: How to Break Into Freelancing When You're Fresh Out of School

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 there and thank you for joining me for episode 69 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 quick reminder, you can find the details shown us to this episode by going to b2b launcher.com forward/episode69. So today I'm going to be addressing the topic a little differently. You know, I usually have a very short monologue where I introduce the, the folks or the person I'm interviewing and I get right to it today. I want to preface the two interviews, short interviews that I have today with some kind of surprising and alarming, alarming statistics. You know, what's going on in the economy. I don't really talk too much about politics and the economy. In fact, I stay away from some, some politics at all in social media in this episode just because it's so controversial. We're so polarized as a country these days, it's just impossible to even say anything without people just getting all upset. And you know, even though there's forums where that's certainly appropriate and desirable found that it just doesn't really, there's nothing constructive that comes out of it when I do it or if I do it in my social media account or, you know, in this podcast or other similar forums. So I've pretty much stayed away from it. But you know, there's a component here that I think it's too important to ignore and really has, it can be charged with, with political commentary. But I'm not going to do that because to me it has nothing to do with politics. It has nothing to do with party affiliation or anything like that. And this is the, the topic of education. And specifically I'm talking about education in North America. Can't really speak to education everywhere else, but I think this is a problem in most industrialized countries. So just bear with me. And if you're somewhere in Europe or Australia or somewhere else around the world, I think some of this will resonate with you. And let me start by just kind of firing off some alarming statistics. So in the US roughly 8.5% of college graduates between the ages of 21 and 24 are unemployed right now. That's the class of 2014. These kids are having a heck of a time Finding work. The Economic Policy Institute, I think it's what they're called, EPI have found that 16.8%, and this is even more alarming, 16, 0.8% of new graduates are underemployed. So by that they're either jobless and hunting for work or they're working part time because they can't find a full time job or they're in a position that doesn't require a college degree. In other words, they're just out there, but they're not where they want to be or need to be. That's how I define it. The article I read defined it more broadly, but I think it was a little silly. The point is he's, these kids are not where they want to be. Among 22 year old degree holders who found jobs in the past three years, more than half were in roles not requiring a college diploma. And that's quite alarming. You know, more than half are in jobs that. You know what, that's gotta be demoralizing, right? Okay, great. I just spent the last four to six years of my life, you know, doing this and I'm $30,000 in debt or higher and I am in a job that doesn't require what I just spent all this time and money doing. That's man, way to be motivated, right? Something else here. Let's see. Graduates of the class of 2012. And this is the latest statistics I have. I don't have anything more recent, but the average these kids owed in terms of student loans was $29,400, according to the Institute for College Access and Success. So these kids are $30,000 in debt. And the debt in the US for student loans has now topped $1.2 trillion. Okay. It's a new level. In fact, Mark Cuban, the billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, late December came out saying, hey, you know, this is this easy money in student load. Debt is a bubble that's going to burst and we're going to have some serious problems in this country. And not only that, but colleges are going to go out of business because the only reason that there's demand is because there's money to be had and to be lent to these kids. And you know, I would add that I'm not sure if I agree entirely with Mr. Cuban, but what I would say is this unsustainable. I mean, how can you create a system where tuition is going up at many times the cost of living every year and the kids who are coming out of school can't find work, can't Find the work that they need. I mean, they're finding work that doesn't require a college degree. I mean, how is that sustainable? How will you keep motivating and encouraging people to go to school when that's the best that can happen? So this is very worrisome. In fact, I'll tell you and just bear with me because I'm going to get to our interviews today. But I believe that I need to set this up the right way. And I think this is a bigger topic than just freelancers kind of coming out of school or kids who are coming out of school who are thinking about freelancing. This is a bigger, more important topic. And my wife and I are currently rethinking the education of our children. I've been talking about this, writing about this and thinking about this for many years. I really believe in North America, we're still trying to prepare kids for a world that no longer exists. You know, our educational system was set up in the, in the 19th century. And, you know, we just perfected this in the 20th century for, for a command and control workplace. We were basically training kids to be great workers in a factory environment, in a corporate environment, environments that. I don't know of a better way to say it. It's command and control, right? You're in a huge organization, you're a cog, and that's no longer the world we live in. Sir Ken Robinson has one of the most popular TED talks out there. I'll include links to all this in the show. Notes, by the way, woke me up to this several years ago. Our schools are killing the creativity of our children. There's a new documentary just came out and I'm dying to see it. I just watched a trailer this morning called Most Likely to Succeed and I'll include a link in the show notes and you'll see. Watch the trailers if you do anything, you know, it's alarming. And where I'm going with all this is, you know, I really believe that freelancing or contingency work is the way of the future. And that's not just my opinion. Many leading experts and economists are saying that's just. That's where we're headed, you know. But the trouble is that if you're fresh out of school and you have no contacts and no relevant experience, how do you get started as a freelancer? How will you get your break if no one is willing to give you a break? You know, it's easy to talk about the strategies we discuss in this program. Admittedly Right. I can talk about this all day long. And if you have a few years of work experience under your belt, right, you've been out there as a professional. It doesn't matter if you haven't freelanced yet. If you have a few years under your belt, you can make things happen. You have a few contacts, you have some relevant experience. But what do you tell a kid, 22, 23 year old kid, who the best he's been able to do is, you know, work part time at, you know, in a retail environment to kind of COVID bills while he was in school, you know, just to, just to kind of like get some income coming. And that's, that's the only experience he has. The only contacts he has are his parents, friends, you know, and even that is a little fuzzy. So in this episode, what I'm doing is I found and actually found several people, but I wanted to give you two different perspectives and you'll find a lot of similarities in their discussions. But I'm interviewing two young freelancers who face the same dilemma. A few years ago when they were just coming out of school, they knew what they wanted to go out on their own, but they had no experience, no portfolio, very few contacts. How do you get started? Most people wouldn't even consider it. And most people who consider it give up very, very easily.

They.

So the first person you're going to hear from is Tony Scherba. And Tony started out doing internships while he was in school and he was building websites at the same time. And today he's grown into the president of a company called Yeti. They're a very successful San Francisco based design studio. It's impressive what they've been able to build, he and his team. And then Brianna Ford is the other individual. And Brianna is a freelance writer who started her career with an unfinished degree. She had very little experience and very few contacts. And today she has a successful and growing freelance business where she creates content for businesses and bloggers. She also does some social media management as well. So Tony and Brianna share their individual stories with me in today's show. And what I wanted to do is in order to get the most from each person in their story, I decided to do the interview separately. So you're going to first hear from Tony and it's about 15 minutes or so and then I'm going to bring Brianna in and you can hear her story as well. Both are wonderful. I encourage you to listen to both. This is useful and inspiring information and insights even if you're not in this particular situation because, you know, I think even if you've been at it for a while, the underlying lessons here are not necessarily about being young and inexperienced. They're about starting anything big from scratch, about creatively reinventing yourself and working through big obstacles. It's about not giving up when others are dropping like flies and about doing the non glamorous stuff at first, even if it kills your pride, even if you're demotivated by when, when you do that. So anyway, with that, let's go ahead and go to Tony's talk first. Hey Tony, welcome to the show. It's great to have you, man.

Thanks Ed. Happy to be here.

Yeah, so. But you know, before we get started with your story, tell us a little bit about the kind of work you do today. What's your business like, what kind of work do you do, what kind of clients you work for?

Absolutely. So we're based in San Francisco. We're a development and design studio is the best way to describe it. We've worked with startups mostly now, well funded ones early on, not so much. And enterprise companies like we've worked with Google and Hershey's and Qualcomm, pretty big names and we build. Our bread and butter is building websites and applications to work with the different products that these companies are making. But recently have been getting into R and D and developing with what everyone's calling the Internet of things right now. So working on some really cool projects, integrating with hardware stuff, stuff like that. I wish I could actually talk more about it, but usually, usually we're covered under a lot of NDAs on that stuff.

You'd have to kill me. Yeah. So you know, I know you got started when you're pretty young and I'm, I'm interested, very interested to hear your story about how you got started, the challenges you faced as, as a young guy starting out with little experience, very few contacts. So kind of walk us through how that, how that happened.

Totally. Well, I could go way, way back. I'll cover that real quickly. Basically been building websites since I was like kind of 14, 14 years old, but not very quality ones. They've been getting better as time has gone on. But went to school for, for computer science and business and was luckily at a school that really promoted internships and stuff like that. So was able to get an internship, they called them co ops at my school, but was able to get a couple internships and build some websites, build some connections there and basically did a ton of free work. And then as I was Graduating from school, myself and my business partner now, Rudy, we were developing applications for. On the side and doing different things like that, websites, etc. And we ended up. We ended up forming a company because it made sense. We were in Boston at the time. We moved out to. Moved out to San Francisco. Company's called Yeti. And we've basically been kind of building it and growing it, and now we're making, you know, making over a million dollars a year. We have, you know, our own office, our own building here in Soma in San Francisco and 11, 12, 13 employees. We work with a lot of freelancers, so it's kind of a mystery there as far as the exact number of people on the team.

Yeah, that's still impressive. You're working with some amazing clients. Clients doing great work. I mean, you got your own office down in San Francisco and you started basically just doing some intern work in college. I'm curious, how did you convince your first few clients to give you a chance? Right, because I understand that, yeah, you had some practical experience with some work you were doing as an intern, but how did that. You know, there's always that big chasm you have to. Right. To get your first set of clients. How did that happen?

Totally. I would say it's to be 100% honest, doing free work.