Katie McManus on why starting a business full-time is harder than expected: without a work schedule, social invitations and family requests fill your day, you fall behind on client acquisition and marketing, and people think you're free.
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One of the hardest things when I started my business and I went full time was that I didn't have anything on my calendar. So I just kind of had, quote unquote, free time. And it wasn't actually free time, it was work time. But because it didn't have. It didn't have this structure that I was used to, I would get invitations from friends to go to lunch, and another friend might ask, hey, I'm going to go work out. You want to come work out with me? You know, family would ask me for favors knowing that I didn't have anything planned. And I would say yes. Cause I'm an extrovert and I like spending time with my friends and I like doing favors for my family. And what I realized I was actually doing to myself is I was causing myself a great deal of anxiety. I knew in the back of my mind that I wasn't doing the work, I wasn't doing the foundational work to get my business up and running full time. And I found myself actually resenting my loved ones because how dare they ask me to do this stuff. Stuff they know that, like, I have a job. But I realized that they actually didn't know that I had a job. As far as they could see, I just quit my job and I was unemployed. As a new business owner, as someone who has to really buckle down and get those beginning clients, figure out your marketing, figure out how to do your sales funnel, figure out a whole bunch of other stuff. From the outside, it looks like you're not doing anything. It looks like you're just hanging out, playing, playing on your computer all day. And so the people around you are going to see that and think, oh, cool, they're free. Let's invite them to do fun stuff. And it's hard to say no because we all love fun stuff.