Episode 52: One Year of Ditch the Classroom Tips

Full Episode Transcription:

(00:07):
Y’all, oh my goodness. We are officially celebrating one year of the Ditch the Classroom podcast. Just over a year ago, I just felt God’s calling to start this podcast to help more moms and teachers just follow their dreams of ditching the classroom and working from home so they could spend more time with their babies. But I literally had no idea what I was getting into, and that was so scary, but I knew that y’all needed this.

(01:19):
And so, I’m so, so, so happy that I pushed through. And here we are one year later with amazing numbers of downloads each week. So many lives reached. And I’m just so, so grateful for each and every one of you that takes the time to listen to even one episode. I just love y’all so much. So to celebrate one year of the podcast, I wanted to do something special for y’all. So I compiled the top five most popular episodes into one collection. So this is really meant to inspire, motivate, and drive you to pursue your dreams of ditching the classroom. Before we hop into this special episode, I do want to invite you to register for the free Launch Your Freelancing Business Challenge, which starts tomorrow, October 6th. You can register for this three day challenge by visiting ariannavernier.com/free-challenge or by clicking the link in the show notes.

(02:26):
This challenge will help you get clarity on what services you want to offer that will make you light up and just make you excited to work on your business each and every day. It’ll also help you figure out where to find paying clients so that you can replace your teaching income quickly. And the top three mistakes that new freelancers and virtual assistants make so that you can avoid those and start working from home with your babies faster. There will also be a special gift for those who register, as well as an exciting giveaway, but make sure you get registered because registration closes tomorrow. So click the link in my show notes and get signed up ASAP. All right, let’s dive right in to today’s special episode.

(03:17):
So today’s episode is a little bit brief, but it is very important, very powerful, something that’s really necessary in your business, very necessary when you’re starting out, but still necessary, even now where I am at in my business. And that is the importance of establishing your “why”. Why do you want to start a business, or start this new journey, outside of the classroom? What is fueling your desire to do that? As a business owner, you are in charge of getting your work done, and you don’t necessarily have someone reminding you to work on your business or in your business. And so sometimes it can be easy to let things slide say, “oh, I’ll get to that later” push it back, push it back. And then things never get done. And you never see progress towards your Ditch the Classroom goals. So having a “why” behind your business really will push you towards, you know, even if you don’t feel like getting the tasks done that you need to get done, if you have your “why” pushing you, you’re like, “okay, I just gotta sit down and do this. This is why I’m doing it.” And it just pushes you towards your goals. That’s the biggest thing of what it is. It can be really simple. It’s just is a couple sentences about what inspires you to work on your business. So I’m just gonna share an example of my “why” so you can kind of get an idea for it. My, “why” is that I wanna show my daughter that she can achieve anything she sets her mind to. I really wanna be home with her to watch her grow and witness all of her firsts. I also wanna work my business so that it’ll allow us to travel. Full-time in our RV in the near future. We just need to get our household and then we’ll be ready to go full-time and my business allows us do that.

(05:23):
And then I also wanna continue to work, and grow, and scale my business so that I can eventually bring my husband home from his job, ’cause he still is working his nine-to-five. So our eventual goal is to retire him. So that’s it, like I said, pretty simple. It doesn’t have to be super long. It doesn’t have to be pages and pages. Just a couple sentences about what inspires you. You know, if you are working towards having a family, starting this business now before you have the family will allow you to grow it to the point where you can be home with your future children. If you already have children, this business could allow you to spend more time with them. ‘Cause I know the classroom, you lose a lot of time with your children. Just an example, but very, very, very powerful.

(06:13):
I highly recommend doing this. I say, I’m gonna challenge you to sit down right now, right after this episode ends write down on a piece of paper. What your, “why” is. You can write it on with a dry erase marker on your mirror so you can see it every day. Put it on a post-it note in your car, put it on your desk at work. Somewhere where you’re gonna see it and always be able to reflect on it. This is also something that’s not set in stone. It’ll change with you over time, but really powerful and really important to reexamine, you know, every month and see, is there anything I wanna add to this? Is there anything that has shifted or changed? And yeah, just very, very powerful. So sit down. Write out your “why”. I’m gonna hold you accountable. Take a picture of it and DM it to me on Instagram @arianna.vernier. And I would just love to see what inspires you guys. So, reading people’s “why’s just makes me so happy ’cause I know you guys amazing dreams, amazing goals, and you can do it. You just need a reason.

(07:23):
So today’s episode, we are talking about the importance of investing in your business. When I was first starting my business, the thought of investing money into it really – I’m not gonna lie – scared me. But I found that it’s very crucial to growing a successful business. There’s a saying that it takes money to make money and while that’s not always true, it is very helpful and something that a lot of people try to skip and then it just takes you a really long time. So something that I’ve heard that’s super applicable is that nothing is ever good, cheap and fast. It can only be two out of those three.

(08:14):
So if something is cheap and good, it’s not going to be fast. If something is good and fast, it’s not going to be cheap. So with starting your own freelancing business, you can go the DIY route to learn how to start your freelancing business. But you’re probably going to make a lot more mistakes that those who have gone before you could help you avoid. So when you’re investing in your business, you can invest two things, money and/or time. If you wanna save time and replace your income faster so you can ditch the classroom, like I know you do, (otherwise you wouldn’t be listening to this episode), then you’re going to need to invest in the skills to do it faster with less mistakes. So when you’re thinking about investing in yourself to gain the skills needed to create your business or expand it, there’s a wrong way to look at it.

(09:15):
And then there’s a better way. The wrong way is when you think, “okay, I’m investing this money. That means I’m losing this money.” That’s not true. When you’re investing in your business, most of the time, if you put in the time and energy to backup that investment, you are going to make your investment back. So, when you’re thinking about it, you kind of need to do like a mindset switch. Where, when I invest in my business, I’m building the skills or learning the tools necessary to make back my invest 100% or more. So most of the time your investment is going to come back to you even more than what you originally invested. Take a shot for how many times I say invested in this episode. But, when you invest to learn new tools, systems, strategies, skills, whatever, you’ll be able to use those things to take you to the next level in your business.

(10:19):
So it’s allowing you to save your time, which you know, if you’re still in the classroom and thinking about ditching the classroom, you need to save time because you don’t necessarily have a lot of time to spend learning how to do everything in your business after you get out of teaching. And/or maybe you wanna really save your time to spend with your kids and that’s the most important thing to you. So to learn how to run a business outside of the education system, you need somebody to help teach you how to do these things faster.

(10:58):
Hey, Hey, beautiful souls. Welcome back to the Ditch the Classroom podcast. If you’re a regular listener and if you are new welcome, I’m so glad to have you. So today’s fun fact that we do with every solo episode is that I have one sibling. He’s my brother, obviously he’s a he. And he’s 15 months younger than me and he’s a major pain in my butt, but I love him dearly. So today’s episode is all about the number one tip that I give to all new freelancers and virtual assistants. And that is the art of networking in your business.

(11:44):
You might say, “well, what do you mean by networking?” And what I mean is taking the time to give value to people without expecting them to purchase your services. So wherever you are looking for clients, I want you to take some time to set aside 10 to 30 minutes, three to five days a week and just take the time to provide value in that space. So for example, if your dream clients probably hanging out in Facebook groups, I want you to go in 10 to 30 minutes a day, three to five days a week and just see where you can answer questions, give feedback, give advice, all of those things. This is not you going in and applying for jobs like you should spend time each day of the week doing that. But this networking time, this is separate.

(12:40):
This really allows you to do three things: build relationships – you wanna build those relationships with people, even if they don’t necessarily need your services. If they know that you’re the go-to to answer questions about the services you offer. If they come across somebody who needs that service, they’re more likely to recommend you. It also establishes your authority. So it shows that you know what you’re talking about, you’re the go-to person for this service, this question that they’re asking, and they’re likely to go after you answer the question, they’re likely to click on your profile and go check out what different types of services you offer and probably hire you. It also builds trust. So it shows whoever’s post you’re commenting on it shows them that you are willing to give advice for free. And they’re gonna think if she’s willing to answer these questions for free, like what value am I gonna get from her if I pay her. These are the top three main reasons that networking is so important in your business. And I do wanna make a little caveat here. This is something that you’ll confidence over time. If you are new to the freelancing and virtual assistant world, you might not feel super confident answering questions yet, but there’s different posts where people are just asking for like opinions on a logo, things like that. You can start answering those questions and just give your opinion there and start building the relationships there. And as you get more confident in your services, you will feel more confident in answering the different questions. So I want you to set aside, like I said, 10 to 30 minutes a day, three to five days a week as a new freelancer, I really recommend you do the full five days a week because networking, you’ll see it’ll, it’ll start slow.

(14:42):
Like you won’t see a lot of feedback from it at first, but really you’ll see it start snowballing over time and you’ll start getting all these recommendations. One of my very first website design clients, I landed her because I simply answered a question. She posted a question in the group. Don’t remember what it was anymore, but I just said something along the lines of, “Hey, this is how you do that. You can use this plugin.” And I probably promoted Elementor ’cause that’s what I love to use for websites. And I probably said something like, “if you wanna see an example of what Elementor can do, you can check out my site here.” And then she went and checked out my site. I didn’t say, “do you wanna work with me?” I didn’t say any of that. She clicked on my site. She saw my work, loved it.

(15:31):
And she scheduled a call and filled out the contract and invoice within just a couple days. So this is how – I just wanted to show you a real life example. Like this works. Networking is one of the most crucial parts of starting your freelancing and virtual assistant business. So I wanna hold you accountable to get this done. And speaking of holding yourself accountable – episode 15 has that same exact title – back in episode 15, Holding Yourself Accountable, I gave y’all a free weekly planner guide to help you fit in all the different elements of your business and your personal life. And in there, I have a section on each day for networking so you can keep track of it and make sure you’re getting it done three to five days a week. So go to that episode and grab the link in the show notes. Actually I’ll include the link in the show notes here as well for y’all and yeah, I want you to do this. So if you wanna be even more accountable, send me a screenshot of you getting this checked off your schedule each day and I will celebrate with you ’cause I think that this is so important. I hope you guys found this helpful. Let me know if you have any questions you can always DM me on Instagram @arianna.vernier, and I will see you next week.