Freelancers. Do you know what it means to be your own best client?
Are you tired of the feast or famine cycle? If so, listen up.
Service providers tend to be people pleasers and givers (speaking from experience,) and it’s a double edged sword.
While being of service to others is a noble pursuit, and may bring income into your business quickly, it also indicates that you may be experiencing short term thinking.
In the long run, being of service to others before you are of service to yourself will lead to a cycle of feast or famine that will keep you stuck and struggling.
I know this happens, because it happened to me. After a decade and a half of being online I am finally once and for all putting an end to that feast or famine cycle.
You don’t have to spend 15 years figuring this out.
You already know the answer, and that is that you need to market your own business as if it were one of your clients.
That means doing all of the same steps and all of the same things to market your business, the same way that you do your clients. If you wanna get out of the feast and famine cycle, you need to build your own business and take it as seriously as you do with your clients.
You also might need to forego the short term revenue for the long term, bigger picture.
Before I break down the steps, I’m gonna tell you a little story of Ryan and Kate.
Be Your Own Best Client Story Time
It’s a little bit like the tortoise and the hare.
Starting back in 2010, there was a young kid named Ryan, and there was a young kid named Kate.
Kate and Ryan both started selling social media services to businesses.
As a matter of fact, some of the strategies that Ryan learned and used, he learned from a course Kate made, called “Let’s Get Social”.
Pretty soon, Ryan got frustrated with his progress and decided there must be a better way.
Ryan began taking on the consistency of marketing himself and his business by making one post every day on social media for the last 10 or 15 years.
Crafting that post took him maybe 10, 15, 20 or 30 minutes a day.
Consistently over time, Ryan built an amazing multimillion dollar business that is truly of service to people.
He has over 2000 members in his apex mastermind. He just bought a commercial building to move all of his team and his employees into.
Ryan has achieved phenomenal success.
Kate is so proud of Ryan for all of his successes and is grateful that she got to watch from the sidelines all these years.
But that’s just it… she was on the sideline.
So you see the story of a young girl named Kate who got started online back in 2008 chose to put client services first to continuously feed herself with income, instead of taking the risk to go out on her own with consistency to market her own business.
By now, I’m sure you’ve realized that I am the Kate in this story and Ryan is my phenomenal friend, Ryan Stewman.
Instead of being more committed to my own personal marketing over the years, I leaned heavily into supporting my clients, which has gotten me where I am today.
Don’t get me wrong, I still have a very successful mid-six-figure business.
But the difference between the career Ryan has built, and the career I have built can literally be summed up by a simple commitment of posting one time a day, every day, highlighting your work and your business.
So I want that to be a lesson for you to market your own business.
Step 1: START WITH AN AUDIT
If you’re wondering, how would I even do that?
You’re going to approach your business as if you are the client. Imagine you were doing an audit for a client. Some of the questions you might as yourself are:
- What are your objectives?
- What are your challenges?
- Why are you here doing this audit?
- Do you not have enough leads?
- Do you not have enough sales?
- Is your goal to get discovery calls booked with clients?
- Do your social media properties align with your goal or messaging?
- Do you have landing pages? Are they refined and ready for marketing?
When you do this audit, you are holding a mirror up to yourself and your business. What do you see? Ask and answer the same questions you would if you were working with a client.
Be your own best client 😉
STEP 2: Evaluate your resources
Once you’ve completed your “be your own best client” audit, you have to take the next steps, which is to figure out what are the resources that you need in order to accomplish the conclusions you can to in your audit.
And evaluate what resources you have on hand that you can that I can use immediately.
And what resources do I need to acquire?
Step 3: To Be Your Own Best Client, Put your actions IN your calendar
Once you decide which pieces of the audit you’re able to move forward with, put those actions into your calendar.
- What days are you going to film content?
- What days are you going to post a blog post?
- What days are you going to share on social media?
- And what are you going to share?
- Is it a video? Is it a text post?
Lay it all out in your schedule, the same way you would for a client.
Step 4: Be consistent and BE THE CHANGE
In my Facebook group of more than 50,000 social media managers. One of the chief complaints is that they don’t get enough content from their clients to actually post on social media.
Therefore, their client accounts don’t go as well as they would like them to. But the challenging part of that whole situation is that we have to be the change.
If you’re reading this, it’s likely that you don’t create enough content for your social media channels to post regularly and bring in new business for yourself. So that being said, I understand that often, the cobbler’s kids don’t have any shoes.
I do not judge a social media manager’s skill set by what they post on their own social media, because oftentimes the social media manager is not properly marketing themselves and it usually means that they’re away doing a phenomenal job for their clients!
But it’s time to change that.
If you want to get out of the feast and famine cycle and bring in consistent growth and revenue for yourself, you need to be your own best client and start consistently posting to market your own social media manager business.
I’m Kate Buck Jr of Social Media Pro. If you like this video and you wanna see more of it, please subscribe to my YouTube channel and support my efforts to do exactly what I’m talking about in this video, which is to grow my business by doing the work and leading by example.
