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FHS 40 Starting in Tech ft Chanita Simms

Freelancer Head Start — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 07:08:46 +0000

A nanny turned Melanin (dot) Tech Founder and Help Scout growth specialist, she is dedicated to showing the world that there is more to black people than what you see in the media. Chanita is committed to helping people of color earn opportunities in the tech industry and sustain long-term, rewarding careers. She is usually advocating for the advancement of diversity and inclusion, traveling the world, playing Uno or attempting to dance salsa.

Chanita’s mission is to create lasting change in the tech industry that she knows and loves. Her brand of change is focused on inspiring others to stand up for what they believe in and to never run away from something they enjoy, even if they feel as if they don’t belong.

She and her partners created Melanin.Tech to give techies of color a safe space to share stories, enhance skills, find opportunities and feel heard. Melanin.Tech host meet-ups, curate an online community, offer conference scholarship, provides job listings and sells apparel to all techies in order to amplify the importance of diversity, inclusion and belonging in the tech world.

Website:https://www.melanin.tech
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/melanintech/
Blog: https://medium.com/@melanintech

Here are a few points of what we talked about:

Chanita started off as a nanny
Works for Growth Scout as a growth specialist
Impostor syndrome is real and can hit harder if you are a minority
Step up and take ownership of your career – You’ll be viewed as the expert
You may be the only person in your organization that looks like you, but that shouldn’t stop you from BEING you
You don’t have to be the same to be in tech
- Be bold and be yourself! Stand out and you’ll make it farther
Take time to invest in yourself and learn something new. You don’t have to always have a degree or be a developer to be in the tech field
Do what you love; what you know and get experience from your journey
Join small projects + Volunteer / Freelance forums
- Fiverr.com
- Upwork.com
- etc
Start somewhere by. Work on projects

Once you get a little experience, start flexing! It doesn’t pay to be humble.

Going from 0 to 100 is not required. You can go from 0 to 1 and you’re still an expert
There are always levels to what you’re an expert with
Don’t be afraid to start!
Technology evolves and so will you. There are so many avenues of the tech field
Step up to challenges and ask for more if you’re already working in a tech field/company
Don’t prioritize prestige over what fits for you
Burn out is real and will creep up on
Go where the people are! Make friends in the tech space and network
Melanin.tech is striving to help build relationships
Helping you find jobs, but with screeners to include diversity
- Indeed
- Zip Recruiter
- Atlanta Tech Village
Finding a job is a full-time job in itself, and having someone in your corner is a win-win!
Knowing your own worth and being firm with what your requirements are powerful
Diversity and inclusion consulting
Build a community where you can be yourself
- Meetup events hosted with Melanin
HATE those “speed dating for professionals” events
Building that relationship takes time
Icebreakers at events help get people started
Challenges with working from home
- Impostor syndrome X 1,000,000
- Fear of being fired
Codeswitching – Change yourself to match the environment/people
How DARE you!
- College drop out
- Woman
- Woman of color
Be yourself and you’ll be just fine! You’ll enjoy yourself and your clients can tell
Your clients and customers can sense when you’re real and genuine
- Reduces stress
- Builds trust
“Your baby is cute as a button!” vs “Wow…your baby looks JUST like you…”

People are just people. At the end of the day, we’re all talk about the same things.

Networking does not have to be collecting a business card
Keep the conversation going and flow with F.O.R.D.
- Family
- Occupation
- Recreation
- Dreams
You can start the conversations
Working at Toys-R-Us as Geoffrey the Giraffe
Everyone should work in retail at least one sale cycle
Be friends with your tech support department
Face time with the different tech levels. Build that report
Conferences and networking events
- Afro Tech – Large conference with a diverse group of people
- Code camp – Local Atlanta techie conference
As you progress with your career, your roles changes
Diversify your skills to be more independent
- Meeting customers
- Closing sales
- Meeting other professionals
- Non-tech skills; soft skills
Sometimes you have to experience it to learn you don’t like it
Working in South America
You have to put some action towards your learning
Melanin.Tech 2019 Focus
- Career Awareness
- Screened Job Listings
- Building a community
- Flat Iron Schools
- Virtual Meetup

Quick Picks

Chanita

Switch Yards Coworking space – Downtown co-working space
- Dope coffee partnerships

Marion

Savannah River Street Sweets – Local candy company in the historic section of Savannah
- https://www.riverstreetsweets.com/

The post FHS 40 Starting in Tech ft Chanita Simms appeared first on The Freelancer Head Start.

FHS 32 Where to Start

Freelancer Head Start — Fri, 31 Aug 2018 19:00:46 +0000

Listen To the Podcast Now

Where to Start

Most freelancers or entrepreneur start off as moonlighters working on side projects. You can transition into a full-time endeavor when you’re ready to take the plunge. “When” is always up to you, but starting a business may not be as hard as you think. Keeping the business running and operating is the real challenge. But we’ll get to that part soon enough. For now, let’s take things one step at a time. No matter what type of business you want to start, you will need these basic 6 steps.

When you’re just starting out and wondering where to start, your mind is full of tons of ideas that you just want to get out there and hit the ground running. But hold up a minute, we need to start planning this out. We’ll first need to find out who our customers are. We need to research our customers and do what is called “market research”.

Who, specifically, are you going to be facing (niche)
What is the problem that you’re hearing the most often
What are they willing to pay
Is it sustainable
Where do they hang out

Finding your customers, what their pain-points, and understanding the value of your services is going to give you that head start that you’re looking for.

After you’ve got a grasp on who and where your clients are. You’re ready to make things legal with your state, federal, and the IRS. Register yourself will help keep them off your back so you can make transactions happen without having to worry about Uncle Sam.

I have an interview with a CPA about taxes and registering with the IRS to keep them off your back. Check out FHS 3: http://freelancerheadstart.com/llc-vs-s-corp-and-the-tax-man/

During the registration process, you’re able to also get yourself a bank account. You need to keep your personal and business money separate, so go ahead and take care of that now.

Once you’re good and registered with a shiny new bank account, you can move onto getting an online presence. The world is smaller than you think and getting online will help you reach all corners of the earth. Grab yourself a domain name and host to do it yourself or purchase a pre-made package. A better and ideal way would be to hire a professional to take care of and grow your online presence while you work on your business.

When you’ve got a place to shuffle clients to see what you’re about, online marketing can help you gain even more traction. You’ll be able to focus your sales funnel, track engagement, and carry clients through your pipeline. As a result, you’ll be able to have a steady flow of potential clients.

And finally, when you’re look for where to start, always ask for help. Don’t be shy to talk to people about what your idea is or what your planning on doing. Make friends in your industry, reach out to Meetup groups, engage in forums and blogs, and generally “show up”. You’ll be surprised at how many people are going to be willing to help you through your tough times. The second pair of eyes and ears can bring about a new perspective on what you’re trying to do!

How to Get Clients

Finding and getting clients is one of the most common challenge for freelancers and entrepreneurs. There really isn’t a secret to finding clients, you have to put in some social effort and go where they are! To find clients, you need to have something that someone needs and be willing to pay for it. The easiest way to get a client is to show them how you are going to better that client from where they are now. They are essentially investing in what you have to offer to help them 2x, 10x, or 20x their returns.

In order to get your clients rolling in, you first need to work on your client profile. You need to be able to pick your client type, industry, and budget level out of a lineup. If you don’t know who your target client is, you’ll be shouting into the void hoping someone will stop by. Finish this sentence, then you’ll be ready to begin finding and winning clients

“I help __________ to __(single group of people)__ who have a yearly profit of _____________”

What you’re doing is making it easier for you to combine your services or products with the companies or people out there. Finally you can start using that to start looking for clients with laser focus.

Common places to find clients includes

Job Boards
Conferences
Chatroom
Face-to-face networking events
Cold calls
Cold emails
Yellow Pages

If you’re like me, you want to maximize your exposure to potential clients and not a huge fan of shaking hands and kissing babies. Well, there are a lot of online sources where you can find GREAT clients and start to work on your sales funnel. Here is a rundown list of where to find clients and jobs online that I’ve used in the past:

Once you’ve identified your niche, your client profile, and potentially where they’re hanging out, you’ll be able to create a proper sales/client funnel. Where to start is becoming more clearer.

Basic Funnel

Here are the steps that you’ll need to do EVERY DAY to keep your pipeline steady. Take at least an hour:

Visit each site above and filter to find projects.
1. Subscribe to RSS feed or email to get listings automatically
Bookmark or note at least 5 potential
Research each lead
1. Carefully read the description – understand the goal of the work
2. Research the contact person and company. Learn their products, competitors, etc.
Contact the lead through email
1. User verbiage that quick, short, and to the point. Don’t come off as sleazy, rude, or know-it-all. Keep it casual.
2. Include information that you researched
3. Include a simple call-to-action that lets you know they might be interested
Followup with the sent email at least twice, per listing. Once every week.

That’s a basic sales cycle for cold-emails, but it will help get your pipeline steady with potential clients who may need your services. The pattern is similar if you meet people face to face or on the phone. Don’t think you have to stick to one type of client outreach. You can use combinations if you’re comfortable.

Validate an Idea

So you’ve got a big idea or service that you think will change the world, but you don’t know if it will fly or where to start. Do NOT pursue an idea or product unless you have a little glimpse of proof that you wont be wasting time or money. Sometimes the market is not ready, sometimes you may need to tweak something, sometimes you’ll find something WAY better. Validate your ideas or products with market research. A little goes a long way!

Market Research is a technique you can use to validate your idea. Market research also will help you find that group of people that your product may be interesting to. You can break market research (finding and researching your customers) into two sub tasks; finding customers and reaching customers.

You’re going to want to do what is called “market research” to help validate your idea

Who, specifically, are you going to be facing (niche, market, clients, customers)
What is the problem that you’re hearing the most often
What are they willing to pay
Is it sustainable
Where do they hang out

I talk with Patrick Selby about how he focused on the “What” with a few pointers and what he learned from his mistakes. Check out FHS 19: http://freelancerheadstart.com/fhs-19-market-research-building-product/

Additional Sources

http://www.reddit.com Sub-Reddits specific to your industry
https://stackexchange.com/ – A list of communities where people ask specific questions. Perfect for collecting common, popular, and hot problems.
https://feedly.com/i/welcome – Feedly is an aggregator of websites that funnels everything into a single dashboard. You can subscribe to a bunch of websites that give you up to date content that you can consume in a single location. You will get a better understanding of what is commonly being said across your industry.
Mailing list – Create or join a mailing list to collectively gather people who will be your potential clients/customers. You can then interact with this gold mine to get ideas or questions answered.
Conferences/Tradeshows – You can’t beat the ‘heard it from the horse’s mouth’ effect. Hit the pavement and attend shows or conferences that are specific to your niche. You’ll be able to rub elbows with your clients and get a direct quote of what their problems may be.

I would honestly spend about 40-60 hours of effort to find and research your customers. If you can understand what your audience is thinking, what their pains are, and a way to help, you’re ready to position yourself as the expert!

Running your Business

Running your business day in and day out may be the easier part of being a Freelancer or Entrepreneur. You’ll get into the rhythm of things and do a lot of your processes automatically. You’ll also get to a point where you can use tools to help take care of the lower-hanging fruit for you. Such as your invoicing, email marketing, contacts, client on-boarding, and other task.

The main rule for being self employed: 1/2 your week is finding clients/work and business admin tasks…the other half is active work

Don’t think that you’re going to be up to the ceiling in client work. You have to keep your machine running and clients coming in. You have to make sure the bills are literally paid, your emails are sent, and your plants are watered. This goes outside of physical client work and we sometimes forget that part of working for ourselves.

Plan your day (or week) where you work on your business and yourself. Don’t overestimate the amount of work you’ll need for client work and pace yourself.

Don’t Forget about Yourself

When you start down the road of actually servicing clients and producing contents or widgets, you’ll slowly start to forget to work on yourself. We get caught up in servicing our clients and customers with 100% of our efforts, we don’t think we need the same amount of effort or services for ourselves. We think that since we’re the experts, we don’t need our own help.

Candace Schilling and I chat about ‘minding your own business’ and working on ourselves. Check out FHS 24: http://freelancerheadstart.com/fhs-24-minding-your-own-business-ft-candace-schilling/

When I, myself, was starting out I slowly noticed that I was polishing my clients websites more than myself. I was putting it a lot more effort into their content and website rather than my own….. We’re the experts but sometimes we need to look internally at our business or ourselves to make sure that we’re using our own talents. We sometimes forget that WE are the experts! Don’t forget to turn our own skills on ourselves

Take a Time Out

Leave time in the week and the day for yourself. Unwind and de-compress. Your business is mostly you and its WILL suffer if you overwork yourself. Make it a priority to take an hour a day to do nothing. Have lunch outside of your work area. Go see a movie. Walk in the park. Play a level of your fave video game. Whatever it takes, make sure you pause your work day. Where to start will depend on your personality, but allot time out of your day to take a breath.

Use tools to your advantage

It’s 2018….don’t fight the digital age! Adopt a few and simple tools that are going to make your everyday work easier. Since we’re in the digital age, we’re also able to work online with most of our content and tools. Here are the two main tools that I use almost daily to run my business:

Dropbox – Free for 2GB. Up to 1TB of space on paid plan

Dropbox is a dynamic synchronizing file stored on your devices. It automatically back things up to the cloud and allows you the ability to access the files and content from anywhere you want or need with your freelancer tools.

Dropbox is my main work space because it allows me grab files, share content, and move things around multiple machines whenever i need. I also use Dropbox to allow my clients a quick and easy way to send me files if needed.

Check it out here: https://db.tt/i1gKYQepsg [Referral/affiliate link]

Get Harvest – http://try.hrv.st/1-294321 (Free for 2 project OR $130/year for unlimited)

Harvest is my go-to for invoicing. It definitely pays for itself with your first client. You can send out an invoice and give the option of 2 payment routes: PayPal or Stripe. Invoices get sent electronically either with a PDF, link, or an email where the clients can pay online directly. You get reporting on who is late and who paid on time. The invoices also have automatic reminders that are sent out at specific intervals.

You can also use Harvest to keep track of time to bill hourly (which is what I use daily), keep track of projects, and keep track of expenses. Reporting is not bad. It won’t tell you categories in your spending like Mint does, but it will let you know if you’ll be pretty close to blowing your budget out the water in overspending. If you have a team of more than one person, you can also keep track of spending and income per-person or per project.

Conclusion

Working for yourself is a fun and exciting challenge and is full of different paths on where to start. You’re the boss and you make all the decisions…good or bad. It may not all be roses and peaches at the end of the rainbow, but for most, its SO worth it! This shouldn’t discourage you from starting down the path of becoming self employed.

To sum it up, these are the 6 starting points when you wanna work for yourself and where to start.

Don’t think your idea or product is stupid one. You never know what you’re going to find with market research and validation.

Start by finding clients online and create a basic sales funnel. From there, you can refine what works for you and where your niche clients are hanging out.

Take time out of the day and week to take care of yourself and that business admin work. There are tons of tools out there that you can use to make your day-to-day easier. Don’t push yourself to the limits and burn out. Its too easy to do that in the beginning.

And lastly, don’t forget to work on your own business! We sometimes forget that we need our own help. Take a look at your own processes and look for ways to improve or change it.

Once you go down the route of becoming your own boss, yes, you’ll com across a lot of obstacles. But I promise you that it only looks like a mountain from where you’re standing. Take that first step and you’ll realize you’re only on a small hill.

The post FHS 32 Where to Start appeared first on The Freelancer Head Start.