And guess what? I could not position myself.

We’re a branding agency for small businesses.

No, venture-backed ones.

Actually, we’re about strategy.

Actually, we’re about sales.

And around and around I went, just like Will Ferrell in the Elf movie in that revolving door.

It turns out it’s really hard to position a branding agency, in part because I think that people pick brand agencies based on vibez, and in part because there are so many agencies out there and only so many points of differentiation. Eventually, we all sound the same.

I could not position my company consistently, and because of that, it was so hard to sell work.

The number one thing that drove sales was me and people who wanted to work with me.

It was specific, but it wasn’t sustainable. And because the business had no other blood source besides me, it started feeling like a parasite. (Is that too graphic sounding? I gotta unpack that one with my therapist later.)

You can’t create consistent messaging.

You can’t get referrals.

And you feel like you’re playing whackamole with a bunch of potential customers.

Now I’m selling to small businesses.

No, I’m selling to venture-backed ones.

Actually, I’m only selling to people who appreciate strategy.

Actually, I’m only selling to people who want to enable sales.

When your business IS positioned correctly, sales is a lot easier. You can see your process build on itself. People “get” it more easily. And they’re much more likely to add your services to cart.

So, what do you need to get positioned? Turns out, it’s the answer to just three questions. We’re going to go through all of them now.

1. Who are you for?

As the quote on every Millennial’s Pinterest Board goes, “You are not for everyone.”

Neither is your business.

This question sounds deceptively easy, and that’s why people miss on it.

I hear all the time answers that sound like this:

“I’m for women who want to live a better life.”

This sounds nice, means nothing. Get specific.

I’ll show you how I answer this question for Business [Comma] Woman:

Business [Comma] Woman is for solopreneurs (or solopreneur-curious folks) who want support specific to sales and marketing to start and grow their businesses.

Notice that I’m not for any kind of entrepreneur. I’m not for anyone who is looking to raise venture capital. And I’m not for anyone looking to get advice on tech, finance, legal, AI, or the like when it comes to growing your business.

If you’re a paid subscriber, I have a worksheet that will help you answer this question; plus, you can submit your answers in our chat or at Office Hours! I’m linking it below.

2. What tension you resolve for them?

You solve a problem. Maybe it’s one you created yourself (helloooo Gwenyth Paltrow’s jade egg) but regardless: you’re solving one.

Selling is easy when your problem you address is:

A) Specific

B) Emotional

And often, that means there’s some tension there.

I’ll show you how I answer this question for Business [Comma] Woman:

(TENSION) Solopreneurs are really good at something, but that something is often not marketing and sales - even though marketing and sales are necessary to sustaining a business, just thinking about ‘sales’ gives many solopreneurs hives.

(HOW I RESOLVE IT) I make sales and marketing accessible and easy for solopreneurs through articles, been-there advice, and templates.

If you’re wondering what your tension is, I’ve outlined a few common ones in the Positioning Worksheet linked below.

3. What is your edge?

Your “edge” is what a lot of people call your “unfair advantage” or your “differentiator.” It’s the thing that helps you stand out and beat out any other alternatives.

This one is often based on your expertise, but it also might be in how you deliver your services. I’ll show you how I think about Business [Comma] Woman:

My edge is my experience (MBA, years leading billion dollar brands, 6 years running my own agency) combined with my delivery method (once weekly articles, monthly Office Hours, and and chat support).

This makes me cheaper and more accessible to alternatives (hiring a coach, an FTE, another contractor, or doing it alone).

OK, now let’s sell it in the elevator.

Your answers to these three questions start to shape up into a pretty good elevator pitch. Let’s look at my answers.

Who I’m for: Business [Comma] Woman is for solopreneurs (or solopreneur-curious folks) who want support specific to sales and marketing to start and grow their businesses.

What tension do I resolve? Solopreneurs are really good at something, but that something is often not marketing and sales - even though marketing and sales are necessary to sustaining a business, just thinking about ‘sales’ gives many solopreneurs hives. I make sales and marketing accessible and easy for solopreneurs through articles, been-there advice, and templates.

My edge: My edge is my experience (MBA, years leading billion dollar brands, 6 years running my own agency) combined with my delivery method (once weekly articles, monthly Office Hours, and and chat support).

I like to start with the tension in an elevator pitch - it usually brings it home quicker.

Here’s mine:

Most solopreneurs start a business because they’re good at something, but that “something” is usually not marketing and sales - in fact the word “sales” gives a lot of solopreneurs hives. Business [Comma] Woman distills a decade of marketing + solopreneurship experience into bite-sized articles, in-person support, and templates to make it easy for a solopreneur to market and sell their business.

Hopefully, that’s a bit more specific, emotional, and compelling than “I write a blog that helps entrepreneurs learn about marketing and sales.”

And if it IS compelling to you - consider subscribing : )

Subscribe now

That’s all for this week. Remember Paid Subscribers have Office Hours and Chat access, so if you’re workshopping your answers, feel free to use those resources to hone in on your final pitch!

Business [Comma] Woman is for anyone building (or thinking about building) a business around their skills. Whatever you’re good at: accounting, tarot card reading, window washing, marketing, therapy -if it’s legal, I want you to make money at it. I focus on the stuff that gives most solopreneurs hives: getting clients, marketing themselves, pricing, etc. If this article resonated or was helpful, please share it!

And let me tell you something else: if you get anxiety-induced brain fog the moment you hear “LLC” or “EIN,” you are not alone. I often think of the Ron Swanson quote where he says, “Hey, I have some apples, would you like to buy them? Yes, thank you. That’s how hard it should be to start a business in this country!”

The fact is, you have to navigate these structures and processes to establish your business and get paid. There is no way around it. And there are plenty of predatory businesses hoping to squeeze a few hundred dollars out of you during this process, betting on the fact that you’ll be too overwhelmed to attempt it yourself.

I personally panicked when I saw the state registration form for my business, couldn’t make heads or tails of what an LLC vs. sole proprietorship was, and then paid LegalZoom to not explain it to me all that well.

They then filed paperwork that I could have done myself in 2 minutes. If you take nothing else from this article, let it be that you are smart enough to do this without LegalZoom, amen.

This overview assumes you want to start a business based on your skillset that won’t raise venture capital or incorporate other partners/investors. If you’re starting a business that’s looking to get investment and/or go public, this is not the article for you!

Whether you’re starting a consulting business, an interior design business, or a telephone psychic business, you have to create the business legally. It has to exist outside of your brain and your Gmail account.

The first thing you’ll have to decide:

1. What structure is your business?

What we’re assuming here is that you’re a solopreneur hanging a shingle around a skill you do well: finance, bookkeeping, home organizing, whatever. Maybe you’ve got some contractors, maybe 1-2 employees. For this scenario, the most common options are: LLC or Sole Proprietorship.

DO NOT GLAZE OVER. WE ARE GOING TO GET THROUGH THIS TOGETHER!

Sole Proprietorship:

This is the one I thought I was, because I was the only person in my business at the time. In fact, because I didn’t know what it meant, I think I may have checked this on some tax forms early on, even though I was never registered as a Sole Proprietorship. (Don’t at me IRS)

What you need to know about a Sole Proprietorship: it’s the easiest and cheapest to set up. It doesn’t require that you file separate business taxes and personal taxes. However, you open yourself up to the most risk with this structure. That means people can come after your house, your car, and your personal assets if they have a problem with your business.

To me, the ease is not worth the risk. But if you don’t want to deal with separate business taxes and you just want to get going for cheap, this is the option for you.

LLC

An LLC stands for Limited Liability Corporation. That is important because remember when I said people can come after your house and car with a Sole Proprietorship? They can’t do that with an LLC.

An LLC makes all of your business liabilities separate from your personal ones. There is immense benefit to keeping that separate: namely that people can’t go after your house over a business dispute.

The downsides to LLCs are:

1. You have to keep your LLC registered with the state

2. You have to file separate business taxes

This makes them slightly more expensive. A state filing fee (~$20 annually) and you have to pay separately to file your business taxes (Likely $600-1500 annually).

But, they have a lot of flexibility. You can change them into an S-Corp to save on taxes (more on that later.)

Are you with me? Good. Here’s what’s next.

2. If you picked an LLC, register with the state

Forget about your friend who registered their company with Delaware. (Unless you live in Delaware, in which case, register your business in Delaware!) Delaware registration as a non-Delaware resident makes sense if you are a corporation raising venture capital and/or planning to go public, but it doesn’t make sense otherwise.

LLC paperwork is super simple to complete and makes your business official in your state. Remember, if you went with a sole proprietorship, you don’t need to register your business.

3. Get an EIN number

Employer Identification Numbers (EINs) are like social security numbers for your business. You do not have to be an employer of full-time employees to have one - the name is a bit of a misnomer.

If anyone hires you as a contractor, they are going to ask for a W9 form, which asks for either your EIN or your social security number.

Would you rather an EIN number or a social security number be passed around all over the internet? I’m betting EIN number. Which is why even if you are a sole proprietorship, I recommend getting an EIN number, too.

To get an EIN, you go to this page on the IRS website. This is free. You do not need to pay anyone else to do it.

4. Open a business bank account and deposit all of the money you make there.

Once you have an EIN, you can use it to open a business bank account. This is important because your personal bank account and your business bank account should always be separate.

You should never be depositing money you make from the business directly into the personal bank account. Nor should you be paying expenses for the business from your personal bank account. Doing so will cost you thousands of dollars in book cleanup and tax issues.

TRUST ME.

It should be noted that you can often get a business bank account with your social security number, but if you ever expand to employees or become a multi-member LLC, EINs are required. Also a lot of banks still like you to have an EIN to keep your busines and personal accounts truly, cleanly separated.

And there you have it.

You have now elected a business structure, registered for an EIN, and established a business checking account to put all of the money you make in.

And, hopefully, you have paid exactly $0.00 to LegalZoom.

Business [Comma] Woman is for anyone building (or thinking about building) a business around her skills. Whatever you’re good at: accounting, tarot card reading, window washing, marketing, therapy - if it’s legal, we want you to make money at it. We focus on the stuff that gives entrepreneurs hives: getting clients, marketing services, selling services, pricing, etc. If this article resonated or was helpful, please share it!

I mentioned I knew a lady who does great nail art.

She said, “OK, you see how you just did that? I want people to be doing that for my business. Like, if they run into someone who needs help with their business’ financial structure, I want them to mention me.”

In other words, she wants referrals.

And if I were a betting woman, I’d say you wouldn’t mind a few referrals heading your way, either.

Referrals are wonderful. They are a warm lead, you have a person in common already, and existing trust makes selling that much easier. They’re a powerful source of business.

The hard part about referrals is that they’re unpredictable. It’s hard to say when someone’s gonna mention, say, nail art, and even tougher to predict if they’ll remember your name or the name of your studio when they mention it.

The good news is that there ARE things you can do to help increase your chances that you’ll get referrals from your network. And all of them are very easy to do. Let’s get into it.

There are three elements of a strong referral system. All of them are equally important.

1. Clarity on the problem you solve

2. Incentives

3. A formal agreement

Clarity on the problem you solve

If it’s not obvious what problem you solve, you are impossible to refer.

For Nail Art Lady, it’s easy. She solves ugly, boring nails. When I hear someone say, “I wish I could have less boring nails,” I immediately think of her, and I mention her name.

Anytime someone asks what your business does, they are a potential referral source.

How you answer that question determines how easy it is to refer you.

Here are some examples to show you what I mean:

If they say, “What does your company do?”

One thing that helps you nail the problem is establishing your company’s positioning. Founding Members get this as part of their subscription, along with monthly office hours and all of my resources and templates ($130 in savings)

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So, get clear on the the following three things:

1. What problem do I solve?

2. Who am I solving it for?

3. What does it feel like for my potential client inside of this problem, and how would they describe it to a friend?

And then practice using those three things in conversation with other people. That way, when someone asks about your business, you’re prepared to give them a strong answer - that also subtly primes them to recognize your people out there in the wild.

Incentives

This one is simple: if you give people money to refer you, they’re more likely to refer you.

You can decide how much you’re willing to part with based on your margins. I’ve seen some people do $500, 3% of the contract, 1% of the contract - even up to 10% of contracts.

How much is up to you. But incentives make it so referrals become strategic as opposed to wishful thinking.

A formal agreement

There’s something about a signed piece of paper. It makes things feel more official.

A lot of businesses have a clear problem, a referral incentive, and then wonder why no one takes advantage of it. My suspicion is that they haven’t formally invited anyone to be part of their referral circle.

Think how you’d feel if someone took the time to be part of their referral program, offered you money, and agreed to it in writing. Would you be more likely to do it? I think yes.

Bonus points if you arm them with a one pager and a sales deck link so they can share it with other people.

And there you have it, folks. Clarity on your problem, incentives, and a formal structure. Now go get people talking about you.

Business [Comma] Woman is for anyone building (or thinking about building) a business around their skills. Whatever you’re good at: accounting, tarot card reading, window washing, marketing, therapy - if it’s legal, we want you to make money at it. We focus on the stuff that gives entrepreneurs hives: getting clients, marketing services, selling services, pricing, etc. If this article resonated or was helpful, please share it!

Of course, the story doesn’t end there. That would not make for much of a post.

Things went left. Not right away, though.

First, we had some wonderful creative meetings. My team delivered on every level: I was beyond proud. The copy hit, the visuals were stunning, and our client (who comprised half of the founding team), was thrilled with all of our work.

Then it became time to pay us for our work. That’s when all of the problems began.

The other half of the founding team emerged. He presented as the business-side of the equation, and maintained he did not ever agree to spend this money with us. He did not want to pay us for any of the work we’d done, and tried to argue that the contract was invalid.

I had three contractors on this project and I wasn’t making much of a margin. I also had, like, two other clients and maybe $5,000 in my business bank account.

In short:

FAAAAAAACK.

To give you some more context, this guy kind of terrified me. He has an MBA from Harvard, and holds a very fancy CEO title. He seems like he means business, and I was only a few months into being a Business Comma Woman.

He also writes very aggressive emails, which I started getting every other day from him questioning the validity of the contract, the work we completed, and repeated unwillingness to pay us.

OK, so now for my first mistake, which you will never make now that you know this story.

Mistake #1: I did not demand any up-front payment

You need to take a deposit for any kind of work. This can look like a percentage of your fee, a month of work, whatever you think makes sense. Have a plan for how you’ll hang on to that money and refund it if the project stops a week in.

This not only protects you financially, but money leaving the bank account early signals that everyone is on the same page within the company. It’s a forcing mechanism for co-founders to be on the same page when they’re writing a check.

If you want language that you can use in your own contracts, I’m sharing that with subscribers below. Remember, I am not a lawyer! This is just a starting point.

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Mistake #2: I did not require payment throughout the project

If your project goes on for months, only being paid at the beginning and the end is tough from a cash-flow perspective.

Get paid by milestone, or each month for hours worked - depending on how you structure your agreement.

Mistake #3: I had zero consequences for late payments in my contract.

This one is an easy fix; say you can (and will) stop work if payments are late, and say you’ll add interest to late payments.

The interest you can charge on late payments varies by state, and you can’t go crazy and start charging 20% a year; the law looks at that as punitive and it won’t hold up in court.

Typically, 18% annually (1.5% a month) and allowing for a grace period of about a week is sufficient.

If you want language that you can use in your own contracts, I’m sharing that with subscribers below. Remember, I am not a lawyer! This is just a starting point.

Subscribe now

Mistake #4: I had no line in my contract about withholding deliverables until I received the final payment

I ended up doing this anyway, as a lawyer advised me that a signed contract, ongoing work and communication would hold up in court and they’d have to pay me. But it’s a good idea for you to have this explicitly stated in your contract if you are handing over any deliverables.

OK, so what happened?

After two really tense weeks (and a multi-thousand dollar hole sitting in my bank account), the client paid me.

The thing that saved me: not handing over assets until I got payment. I got bullied, cajoled, and threatened, but I didn’t hand that guy a pixel of our work until he paid me. And he finally did.

And then, in a delicious serving of schadenfreude, the business ended up going belly-up six months later due to a combination of founder disagreements, additional lawsuits, and a supply chain problem.

Whew.

So in conclusion, go update your contracts.

And remember- subscribers have access to suggested contract language as a starting point to protect you in situations like these (always run it by a lawyer!).

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Business [Comma] Woman is for anyone building (or thinking about building) a business around her skills. Whatever you’re good at: accounting, tarot card reading, window washing, marketing, therapy - if it’s legal, we want you to make money at it. We focus on the stuff that gives entrepreneurs hives: getting clients, marketing services, selling services, pricing, etc. If this article resonated or was helpful, please share it!

I did what anyone without knowledge, research, or any experience would do. That is to say, I did the exact wrong thing.

I was making about $145K at Pepsi as a Senior Marketing Manager at the time. (This was over 6 years ago. I have no idea what they make now!)

I figured $145K, divided by 50 weeks a year, divided by a 40 hour week means:

An hourly rate of $72.

Then, I thought, well I’m pretty good at this, so I can charge more. And I raised it to a whopping $85/hour.

If you know more than I did six years ago, you know this was possibly the worst thing I could have done.

• I did not account for the additional 15% of self employment and unemployment taxes I’d be paying.

• I didn’t make the correct assumption that I’d be working fewer than 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year.

• If I’d done any research whatsoever, I would have learned that my market rate was probably closer to $150-175/hour.

In short, I gave myself a $75,000 pay cut. Whoops.

Here is what I should have done instead:

Make sure you want to be charging hourly

If your work is better suited for project, don’t charge hourly. Not sure? This article (“Deciding on Project or Hourly Rates”) is a good place to start.

Multiply your desired salary by 1.25 to 1.3

Doing this takes into account the taxes you pay, the office supplies you have to buy (no more free work laptops!), and the software you have to use to get your job done. Not to mention insurance, website hosting, and business registrations. Oye.

Divide that number by 1,000

This is a more reasonable number of hours you’ll work in a year, assuming you’re full time.

Pressure test that number.

I once heard advice that you should charge a number that almost makes you want to throw up because it’s so high. That’s sort of good advice, but it ignores one key thing: what will your market pay?

I would love to charge $900/hour. Saying that price makes me want to puke because it’s so high. But guess what? The potential clients in my market don’t want to pay that.

So you need to do two things:

1. See what other people similar to you are charging. Look on their websites. Check out what they say on social about pricing.

2. Ask people in your network who are doing something similar. I feel like no one ever gives this advice, but you can learn so much from a single phone call in which you say, “Hey, I’m thinking of charging XXX/hour. What do you think about that?” You’ll get information about what your market will bear, and live, in-the-moment feedback on your pricing. Plus, you’ll see how it feels to say your number out loud.

After that, my friends, you’ve got your hourly rate. Or at least your ballpark number.

Let’s try it again for me:

($145,000 x 1.3) / 1,000 = $188/hour

Talking to folks in my industry put my hourly rate anywhere from $150-250, right in line with my calculation, but $150-250 gave me a range I could operate within if the client was a bigger, enterprise client ($250) or a smaller client that perhaps couldn’t afford a huge rate, but with whom I really wanted to work ($150).

Get Industry Peers

If you are looking at #2 and thinking to yourself, “I’ve got no one to ask about that!” consider becoming a paid subscriber here. I hold Office Hours for paid subscribers on the last Thursday of every month, and even if you can’t come, you can submit a question ahead of time and get the recording after.

One of those questions can be: “Hey, I’m thinking of charging XXX/hour. What do you think about that?”

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Business [Comma] Woman is for anyone building (or thinking about building) a service business. Whatever you’re good at: accounting, tarot card reading, window washing, marketing, therapy - if it’s legal, we want you to make money at it. We focus on the stuff that gives entrepreneurs hives: getting clients, marketing services, selling services, pricing, etc. If this article resonated or was helpful, please share it!

People feel so strongly about this.

I had people tell me I was a complete idiot for charging hourly, and then I’d have another person tell me hourly was the only way to charge.

Every time I wrote a proposal, I felt like I was messing it up. (And according to at least 50% of the people I was talking to, I was!)

I have now made money on my services and expertise for years. Both as hourly and project rates. Guess what? Both can work. Choosing which one is best for you depends on the work, the client, and you.

Let’s walk through it.

When Hourly Rates Make Sense

You’re being asked for your time.

This one is obvious, but let’s name it. If someone is asking for your time, charge for your time. Don’t overcomplicate it.

You’re worried about scope creep.

Some clients will negotiate your scope down to get the price they need, and before you know it, little add-ons start coming in one after the other. It gets hard to say no to these, especially if you’re trying to protect your client relationship and give good service, so the easiest way to protect yourself is to charge hourly.

You don’t actually know how long this will take.

If you’ve never done this type of project before, or you’ve never tracked your time on a project like this before, charging hourly helps protect yourself from doing unpaid work.

Once you charge hourly once, use this data to determine an appropriate project rate for the next time!

You’re worried about the client being difficult

If your client seems like they’ll want lots of revisions, if they don’t seem to understand the amount of work that’s ahead of them, if they have multiple stakeholders who need to weigh in, charge hourly.

You have variable costs

Let’s say you bring on some contractors to help you deliver the work. If you pay them hourly, that means your costs are variable. Charge hourly to keep your costs from exceeding what you’re making on the work.

Warning: Manage and Communicate your Hours!

Just because you’re charging hourly doesn’t mean that you have a blank check. Communicate how many hours you think something will take so that your client can budget. Give them reports of how you spend your time, and as best you can, communicate if you think your hours will go over.

If you don’t have a tool to do this, I recommend Harvest. Easy to use, reports are excellent, and it has never let me down in six years. (Use that link and we both get $10!)

BTW, we talk about what to charge in Office Hours, which is for paid members and held once a month.

When a Project Rates Make Sense

You’re being asked to do something that you could do quickly, but takes others weeks.

If you’re more efficient at something than the average bear, you should recognize that efficiency in a project cost.

Let’s say it takes you just a few hours to figure out someone’s Instagram strategy for the month. It might take them an entire day. It doesn’t make sense for you to charge hourly for this; if you do, you’re penalizing yourself for being more efficient as opposed to capturing that hard-earned value for yourself.

There’s a clear deliverable and you have a process for getting it done

This point is related to my first one; if you’ve got a process, you know how to get there, and the deliverables are straightforward, project rates make sense. You benefit from delivering a lot of value at efficiency.

You know how long this will take you

If you’re worried that what’s going to be asked of you is actually going to take a long time, you should swing back to hourly. Nothing is worse than scoping a project that you assume will take you 20 hours, only to find yourself at hour 49 with no end in sight.

You have fixed costs

If you charge a project rate, make sure your costs are fixed. Any contractors you bring on should also be a project rate as well. There is nothing worse than paying hourly on a project rate and watching those hours eat into your margin day after day.

Warning: Be very clear on what a project DOES and DOES NOT include

If you charge for a project rate, you need to be very clear what this project includes and doesn’t include. Go over this with your client in the first meeting. Do not expect anyone to read your scope closely in an agreement or proposal.

Whew. That’s it for now. As always- let me know if you have any questions!

And remember hold Office Hours for paid members once a month, where we can figure out questions like these live. Even if you can’t make it, you can submit questions ahead of time, and I’ll always send the recording out afterwards.

Business [Comma] Woman is for anyone building (or thinking about building) a service business. Whatever you’re good at: accounting, tarot card reading, window washing, marketing, therapy - if it’s legal, we want you to make money at it. We focus on the stuff that gives entrepreneurs hives: getting clients, marketing services, selling services, pricing, etc. If this article resonated or was helpful, please share it!

“I just don’t wanna do these jobs,” I would say.

Finally, he threw me a bone and sent me my first client. It was a friend of his starting a culinary-based business.

“Oh! Are you working for him?” I said.

“No,” he replied. “He can’t afford me. But he can afford you.”

I was thrilled.

When I talk to people who want to start their own business, they almost always ask me the same question:

“How do I get my first client?”

We’ll talk about lead magnets, program design, marketing, and all manner of promotion in other posts. I promise. Right now, I want to start with the easiest, most obvious way to support you getting client work. (You’re gonna be annoyed when you read it.)

Here we go: The easiest way to get a client is telling your network you are looking for clients.

I know what you might be thinking. I’m ready for it.

Won’t telling my network I’m looking for clients look desperate?

I’m going to answer your question with a question:

How are people going to know that you are offering this business if you don’t tell them?

I’m really serious about that.

We all want to just have people know about our business through osmosis/inception so that we never have to put ourselves out there, never have to tell anyone directly, and (most importantly!) never look like a failure if it doesn’t work out.

I want that, too. It doesn’t happen that way.

This is what I know to be true:

• People want to know about what you’re doing

• (Most) people genuinely want to help you and would love to support you

• If they don’t want to help you, they’re not a good part of your network

Ok now that we got that part out of the way, let’s talk about how you might tell your network and announce that you’re starting a business.

Good announcements have a few things in common:

• They feel personal

• They explain exactly what it is you do

• They help your network identify who might be a good fit for your services

• They make it easy for people to forward along your information

• They ask for help

We’ll go into detail on all of these next.

Make it personal

Tell everyone why you’re doing this. People don’t care as much about your business. They care about you.

Don’t be overly negative: if you’re starting this because of a layoff or a particularly sh*tty situation, keep those deets to a minimum. Focus instead on why you got into whatever you’re doing (astrology, marketing, bookkeeping, home organization, etc.) with a specific anecdote. Talk about what you’re hoping to accomplish with this business.

Explain what you do

People forget this part and assume their business is self explanatory. It’s not! Tell people in a couple sentences what it is that you do. Be as specific as possible.

Help people identify who is a good fit for your services

People will refer clients to you if it’s easy to recognize someone who needs your help. Help them with this by spelling it out for them.

“I’m a good fit for anyone dealing with [insert this pain point here].”

Inserting things like this help people recognize a good client for you the moment they spot them and refer them your way.

Make it easy for people to forward along your information

Have a website and a blurb handy for them to forward to folks who might want to work with you.

You do not need a big complicated website with multiple pages. You need, at minimum, one page that explains who you are, what you do, and what your edge is.

If you have a hard time answering these questions, I have an offer called Position Or Die, where we clearly position your services in 90 minutes. Founding Members of Business [Comma] Woman automatically get this session as part of their membership.

Ask for help

Here’s another obvious one. Tell people you’d love a referral from them. You don’t need to demand one. Just let them know that if anyone they know might be a good fit for what you do, you’d love it if they’d send them your way.

Templates for “New Client Asks”

No need to start with a blank page here, and probably no need to use Claude to write what should be pretty personalized note to your network. I’ve got a few templates here!

Business [Comma] Woman is for anyone building (or thinking about building) a service business. Whatever you’re good at: accounting, tarot card reading, window washing, marketing, therapy - if it’s legal, we want you to make money at it. We focus on the stuff that gives entrepreneurs hives: getting clients, marketing services, selling services, pricing, etc. If this article resonated or was helpful, please share it!

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That’s what at least three people said to me when I told them I was leaving my job at Pepsi. I had just had my first son. My job was the job to have at Pepsi: I led equity comms for the brand, which meant I was in charge of all the fun stuff: all of our social, experiential, and cultural marketing. I had meet Andy Cohen, for goodness’ sake, and if you know me, this is peaking.

All this is to say, it made no sense I was leaving. And even less sense that I was leaving with no other job offer.

So was I OK? Sure I was.

The short of it was I didn’t want to spend my career slinging soda in Westchester. Pepsi was - and is - an amazing company with remarkable, bright marketers. I just knew in my bones this wasn’t the long-term path for me, and if I didn’t leave now, I might never make the leap.

And the tiny truth that I hadn’t really said out loud: I wanted to build my own business. I wanted to start my own thing, work for myself, and have a little more agency over my life.

My husband was supportive, albeit a bit nervous. We agreed to give me six months to make some money - and if I didn’t, we’d call it.

I had no entrepreneurship experience, no client prospects, and no idea what an LLC was. Even with my work experience and an MBA, I was not prepared.

Over the next five years, I built a multi-six-figure business from basically rubble. It was really, really hard. It was really, really rewarding.

Looking back, I wish I had two things early on:

1. Real resources from other solopreneurs. Not people selling a class on how to grow on Instagram. (No shade to those people. They just aren’t building the same kind of business I am). I wanted to hear from people who had a skill and built an offer, pitch, and business around it.

2. A community of other people doing the same so I felt less scared.

And that’s what I’m building here.

What you’ll find here

This newsletter is for anyone looking to build a business around their expertise. Accounting, home organization, marketing, tarot card reading, whatever it is - if it’s legal, I want you to be able to make some money at it.

I cover everything that I think gives most entrepreneurs hive, including:

The Strategy: I’m all about positioning. If you’re not positioned clearly and correctly, it is SO HARD to build your business. (Trust me, I know because I have done it that way).

The Selling: You can’t have a business without clients. I talk about how to get them

The Pricing: The stuff no one wants to talk about: what to charge, how to charge, how to make sure you get paid.

And you get an added bonus, which is The Community. All paid subscribers can join a monthly Office Hours with me, and talk to each other in the chat. This makes dipping your toe into the entrepreneurship pond a LOT less scary and intimidating.

How to Make the Most of This Page

Subscribe for Free

Free subscribers get most of my articles for free. I publish one in-depth article on strategy, selling, pricing, or pitching a week. You’ll get a sense for how I think and what I talk about.

Become a Paid Subscriber

Paid Subscribers get access to all of my resources that I’ve amassed over five years of doing this work: things like contract language, content prompts, referral program setups, and scope templates.

They also get access to me once a month during Office Hours and in our Subscriber chat.

Become a Founding Member

If you’re serious about getting your business off the ground, consider becoming a Founding Member. In addition to everything Paid Subscribers get, you also get a 90 minute positioning session with me - essential making sure everything you do is built on a solid foundation. Founding Members get this at a discount compared to what I normally charge for these sessions.

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