How Beth Started Thinking Strategically About Her Finances to Encourage Her Business Growth
Since Charge with Confidence, Beth has seen her business go from strength to strength and is thinking about how she can develop it further
Beth is a copywriter and Italian-to-English translator specialising in digital marketing. Now based in Manchester, she started providing her customers with language services in 2016 before developing her skills and embracing the world of copywriting. She currently works with small business owners all over the world to help them create content for their blogs, social media accounts, podcasts and e-commerce stores.
Beth was just about to embark on her fifth year of freelancing when she joined Charge with Confidence in December 2020. She already had a successful freelance business and didn’t feel as though she necessarily needed to do Charge with Confidence. She did realise, however, that there was more she could be doing to help her business grow.
The challenge: encouraging Beth to develop her finance processes and use them to think strategically about her business
Beth had been following me on Instagram ever since she heard my first interview on the Smart Habits for Translators Podcast. She told me that she’d been interested in Charge with Confidence but that I’d never quite managed to convince her to sign up. She felt as though she was potentially too experienced to get any real benefit from the programme. But after speaking to Beth 1:1, she said she realised that there was a lot more to Charge with Confidence than she’d originally thought. When I went into more depth about the exercises we’d be doing, such as thinking about what you want your business to look like 10 years from now, she imagined she’d get a lot out of the programme.
As quite a spontaneous person, Beth admits that she’d never really looked any further ahead than the next 12 months and that she only ever did her admin when she was forced to, when she had time or when she felt like it.
“I was relatively happy with how my business was doing in general, but I recognised that I didn’t really have a plan for the future. I was living by the day rather than considering what I wanted my business to look like in the long term, and this definitely wasn’t helped by my inconsistent admin!”
Our focus, therefore, was to help Beth establish some processes so she would feel motivated to stay on top of her finances and track what she needed to in order to develop her business further.
The solution: making Beth think about what she wanted from her business in the long term and showing her which numbers to focus on to achieve her goals
In Module 8 of Charge with Confidence, we do a visualisation exercise. To be honest, I sometimes worry it might come across as a bit woo-woo, but I’ve had such positive feedback from participants that I always stick with it! Beth is one of the people for whom it’s been a revelation.
“Actually realising what I want 10 years from now was eye-opening, and knowing what I’m working towards has contributed to giving my business direction and focus. Having found the ‘why’ that I was missing, I feel much more inspired to develop long-term goals.”
Once Beth had a clear idea of what a sustainable business looked like for her, the next stage was to make sure she would be keeping an eye on the right figures to turn this vision into a reality.
Beth’s vision was made up of two main parts: working fewer hours and only working with customers that she finds genuinely fulfilling. In order to achieve these aims, we established that Beth would have to keep track of the number of hours she is working, how much she is earning per paid hour worked, and how satisfying she finds working with each of her clients.
The rate calculator spreadsheet I provide participants with helped Beth to set a minimum hourly rate based on the number of hours she is currently working but also an aspirational rate based on the number of hours she’d like to be working in the future.
In Module 12 of Charge with Confidence, I also share a client assessment spreadsheet. Beth was able to use this not only to understand the hourly rate she was earning for each client but also to give her customers a rating based on attributes that were important to her. This way she could understand if there were any clients she no longer wanted to work with.
The results: Beth has increased her prices, put processes in place to carry out a monthly business review and developed a plan for the future
Beth started implementing everything she’d learnt during Charge with Confidence straight away. Particularly with it being the end of the year, it was a great time for her to put her prices up, and she also had a couple of contracts coming round for renewal. Beth increased her rates with three of her customers, two of which accepted. She decided to let the third one go along with another client that she no longer enjoyed working with. This has freed up some time for her to acquire new ideal clients.
At the start of the year, Beth also increased the price of two retainer agreements that were renewed for the same deliverables. This means that, essentially, she is earning more for the same amount of work.
Beth then received confirmation of a new retainer agreement that should result in a better hourly rate than previous ones she has had in place with the same customer. She has even felt brave enough to charge (and earn!) her aspirational rate for one small project.
However, although Beth has increased her income, she says, “The biggest impact has to be in the way I think about my business. I am now approaching it much more strategically and am coming up with exciting ideas for the future.” Not only has Beth put processes in place to make sure she carries out monthly reviews, she has also developed a plan for the future and has broken her long-term goals down into smaller bite-sized pieces.
“Charge with Confidence gives any small, service-based business a great foundation to build on. It enables you to assess your current situation in a targeted way so that you have the information you need to grow your business and achieve your long-term goals. I wish this programme had been available when I started freelancing four years ago!”
In the three months since Beth completed Charge with Confidence, her business has come on leaps and bounds, and I can’t wait to see how things will develop for her further down the line!
One of the reasons I wanted to share this case study with you is to show that, although more experienced freelancers may not need to do Charge with Confidence to run a successful business, it can really help to take your business to the next level.
If you’re an experienced freelancer and are considering Charge with Confidence to make progress in your business, don’t hesitate to contact me to ask how the programme might be able to help you.
