This is a special, off-the-rails, ALT episode with graphic designer Erin Swanson who gets real with us about the pitfalls of freelance work. We talk about the red flags to watch out for when taking on clients (scope creep!), battling loneliness, the need for mentors when you are your own boss, and energy drains that can lead to burnout.
So, whether you’re a seasoned pro or just starting out, you won’t want to miss this insightful, at times silly, conversation among friends!
Connect with Erin on LinkedIn.
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Follow the transcript:
Valery Aguirre:
Welcome back to the podcast with your hosts, Hilary and Valerie.
Hillary Merwin:
Today we have
Valery Aguirre:
Aaron as a guest speaker and we’re going to cover so many topics
Hillary Merwin:
and we’re going to cover her journey as a freelancer, graphic designer turned fiber and
Erin Swanson:
you could just say here’s my really interesting cool Friday was like creative
Unknown:
things who would like to share here and would you like to introduce yourself?
Erin Swanson:
Hi, I’m Erin swats and I really liked to talk to you guys about creativity. And just being your true self and following your passion and making money while you do it. Yay.
Hillary Merwin:
Erin, what are you drinking?
Erin Swanson:
Just good old h2o. Fancy.
Valery Aguirre:
What about you Hill? What do you drink? No comment. No, no, no. Please tell us the viewers want to know.
Joshua Aguirre:
And I’ll eventually see it. Video.
Hillary Merwin:
Sure. Well, I will say the list of ingredients begins with brewed in accordance with German beer Purity Law.
Valery Aguirre:
So it’s beer. Yes,
Hillary Merwin:
this beer. This is called a let me pronounce this. This was restrict struck in from the puck you’re gonna do a defensive authentically
Valery Aguirre:
do pile on pocket. Scratch that. You try and bail him back.
Erin Swanson:
Helen Bucha Perlin bots share Oh,
Valery Aguirre:
oh, she butchered? Did you study languages?
Erin Swanson:
Not really.
Hillary Merwin:
What did you study? Oh, okay. So
Erin Swanson:
some Spanish but we can just table that was. That’s cool. The most challenging class I ever took for me. How
Valery Aguirre:
many classes did you take?
Erin Swanson:
I took it all the way from when you started like freshman year to a tiny bit in college.
Hillary Merwin:
Can you say something in Spanish for us?
Erin Swanson:
Morbihan. Gracias for inviting me to your podcast.
Valery Aguirre:
Okay, well, first off, we each have resumes from Hillary’s resume and Aaron’s resume. Where’s your resume? Your resume bad here. Your
Erin Swanson:
resume. Josh is
Joshua Aguirre:
still working on it.
Hillary Merwin:
Now. Did you update your LinkedIn?
Valery Aguirre:
No, I haven’t updated it.
Hillary Merwin:
Like Florida?
Valery Aguirre:
Oh, it says actually. How last client I haven’t paid since January. Oh,
Hillary Merwin:
that’s not that long ago. There you go. listeners. How often do you update your resume? Let us know in the
Valery Aguirre:
comments below comments. If we have comments.
Hillary Merwin:
Is anyone else struggling to update their LinkedIn? So we have our resumes in front of us so we can see what I’m guessing and so that we can see what each other has worked in their strengths, their history work history.
Valery Aguirre:
Josh, can you fill us in as to why we have our resumes? Oh, we’re
Hillary Merwin:
also here with Joshua.
Joshua Aguirre:
Hey, guys. Hi, everybody.
Valery Aguirre:
Okay, Josh. So can I call you Joe?
Joshua Aguirre:
I prefer Jade money, Joshua
Valery Aguirre:
J money. Do you have any money? So what was the purpose of the resume?
Joshua Aguirre:
Well, I think it’s a good way to kind of see what each of us has worked on. And by each of us, I mean, Hillary and Karen. So that we can kind of go through your history as a freelancer and try to understand a little bit more about what that jump was like, in in two different kind of worlds, you know, because Aaron has come from a nine to five, and Hillary has come from the nonprofit sector. So I think there’s a very big dichotomy there to dissect where you come from the freelance.
Erin Swanson:
I have done both.
Valery Aguirre:
Yeah, which did you do longer?
Erin Swanson:
I worked for a design firm for seven years out of college. And after that, I went into my own business and freelanced for six years, so very equivalent of US. And the company I’m with now or, well, nonprofit. I work for a church. I’ve been there for six years. So it’s almost equal weight and each one of time.
Valery Aguirre:
And so the church one is a subcontract with you, or do you work for them
Erin Swanson:
that actually took a full time position with them. I left my freelance job to go be full time with the church as a graphic designer.
Valery Aguirre:
Cool.
Joshua Aguirre:
So are you still running the business at all?
Erin Swanson:
For a brief time, I did have some crossover where I was doing both and I was freelancing, and I was still working for the church, but work life balance wasn’t too great in that period. So yeah, I was seeking work life balance and that’s why I went back to a full time employer because there’s a lot of it stability, there’s a lot of, you know exactly kind of what your flow rhythm of schedule is. And really I want to be with people work with people. Again, freelancing can be kind of lonely. And in a season of life or like loneliness kind of seems to continue to expound itself. It’s nice to have coworkers, at least some people have to, like spend time with me.
Valery Aguirre:
So you went back to, would you consider that corporate life kind of as a kind of nine to five,
Erin Swanson:
it’s nine to five, but it’s definitely not corporate. Okay. I feel like my corporate experience was very hustle bustle and like stressful and 40 hours was really 80 hours, but I was also a young, right out of school eager person back then. So. And I think there’s some, I do think the corporate world can exploit young people who first get in there because they feel as high pressure to perform and to like, impress expectations, and not always know what those expectations are. So they overdo it sometimes. But the work dynamic of where I’m at now, even though we are currently understaffed, it’s not anything close to the pressure and the anxiety. And the just, I guess, the level of expectation corporate world had, I mean, I’ve worked with companies like Nike and Microsoft, when I was working with the, the firm. So those are high demand, kind of clients that really, you they call them o’clock pm and say, you need to change all the shoe tongs on these, you know, documents by, you know, 7am, tomorrow, we just say, Okay, we do it. So, yeah, it was a lot of 10 moments there. But
Valery Aguirre:
wow. So you went back to the nine to five, because you wanted more of the predictability and relationships, you would say
Erin Swanson:
yes, usually about the relationships. And also when you’re freelancing on your own, it’s a little bit challenging to continue to grow and develop yourself. And I knew if I went back into a company with like, people above me and people below me, I’d have this opportunity to kind of grow leadership wise, which I have done. Now I’m the I’m the Head Designer for a group of designers. And so when I was working on my own, it was a little hard for me to figure out how to do accounting and get clients and write briefs and all that. And I had never gotten to the point where I had people I hired to work underneath me. And I was really struggling to get to that point where I was growing the business by myself. I was maintaining great and I was making more money than I make where I’m at now. But I just wasn’t growing leadership wise, because there was nobody there to show me the way really teach me the ropes or give back mentorship. Yeah, lack of mentorship. So I feel like I’ve gained a lot of things I was looking for by going back to the being with a group of people in an organization who has many tears and layers and different people to look up to and nice guide me and stuff. Yeah. Is this crumbling?
Hillary Merwin:
The? Oh, not at all? Because it’s different. We’re promoting the freelance life?
Valery Aguirre:
No, because there’s so many different, like, people have different reasons why they go back to one way or another. Yeah, this season is her nine to five seasons,
Joshua Aguirre:
right? It’s really fascinating because I actually was interviewing two people today. And they both left businesses to go back to and I thought one of them was in business for 25 years. And, you know, one guy hit the 2008 crisis, his business collapsed, he realized, like the market timing was off. And, you know, I can see people not becoming discouraged, because they don’t want to hit those like, you know, peaks again, and then and then their dreams get crushed. And they’re like, I don’t know what to do. And the other guy was just like, it was too much stress, like, I was working 80 hour weeks. And I don’t want that for my life anymore. Like, I want that stability. And that security, which sounds very much like what you want, in addition to the relationships in that personal connection.
Erin Swanson:
I mean, I would say when I was freelancing, I enjoyed every bit of the experience of it, because I was traveling a lot, I was not living in one place, I could go anywhere, I could work out of any plays. So I’d be in Vermont one week, and I’d be in Charlotte another week. And I’d be in Pennsylvania another week. And I had clients that were all over the country. So they didn’t care where I was, the only important thing to them was that I was communicative. And I was very good at that. So I could be working at 11 o’clock at night and then get up in the morning and be at the beach somewhere in the beach time and then go back and work in the evening. So I was living a little bit of a nomadic lifestyle in that time period. And I was exploring where he wanted to be permanently but I you know, I found myself in Charlotte and really liking it here and then staying here longer, longer. And then then you kind of get to this place where you want to build like something right you know, community structure. And when you’re just you know, this entity alone, and a house, in a city you don’t you didn’t grow up and you have to kind of find people it’s like, well, I can talk to the grocery store clerk or the barista, but how are you going to find these people? Did you have some kind of, you know, relationship building opportunities with so it’s kind of weird to be friends with your clients. I mean, right can do that, but it’s a little bit strange to, you know, balance that space of I’m here, you know, I support you as a graphic designer, and you’re my client, and then we go out party together that can get a little weird. And then like, invoice them after money talks later, along those lines,
Hillary Merwin:
do you have any stories about dealing with a difficult client?
Erin Swanson:
Sure, yeah. As as I went through the whole experience, when you’re when you’re I, for me, at least, when I first started, I thought every client was a possibly great client. And I didn’t have any guidelines or understandings of myself of what makes a good one and what makes a bad one. So you go through a lot of experiences of bad ones, and then you kind of start to notice the red flags are bad clients, just like bad dating, you know,
Hillary Merwin:
what are some of those red flags?
Erin Swanson:
People who you go through a scope of project plan with them, and they start to incrementally continue to add more and more to it, and you’re saying, well, we’ve met that we met, the thing we’ve talked about has been met, and this is extra, and they push back on you and they fight you wanted to famous scope creep? Yeah, no, Cree had a number of those.
Valery Aguirre:
So that’s a huge red flag. Well, the other one, um,
Erin Swanson:
people who do not have a clue what they want, they know it when they see they see something they know, that’s what they don’t want, but they never can tell you what they do want. So you keep iterating and iterating. And they’re like, that’s not exactly it. That’s not it, either. But they can’t really tell you why that’s not it, as well. Uh huh. So I don’t know what the catchphrase for those people are, I think
Joshua Aguirre:
we have to like, fight for clarity with our clients. Yeah, to get them to be very specific, so that we’re not missing the mark. Because generally, when we’ve missed the mark, it’s because they weren’t specific enough.
Erin Swanson:
Yes. Right. And there is an art to getting people to express that and learn, you can learn how to like draw it out of them. But there are just some people who have no language to kind of share with you. And then it’s, sometimes I would just say, Hey, I think there’s, you can find something stock on the internet that you might be like, might fit your need, because you can scour the internet as long as you want and look at many choices. And if you can’t communicate with me, you know, I can’t keep spinning my wheels for you.
Hillary Merwin:
So Aaron, you mentioned one of the things missing in your freelance experience was having someone over you as like a mentor leader to kind of show you the way and help you grow in that. That area. So Josh, I’m wondering, seeing as we we’ve already established that you kind of see yourself and as I’ve experienced you as a mentor in my life as a freelancer so what would you say to that? Or why do you think that’s such a big need?
Joshua Aguirre:
Yeah, I think in my experience, I saw that need, like I was hitting this peak, probably around 2017. Or, like, I did everything that I could that I knew in my power to do in freelancing. And I felt like, Okay, I need somebody to teach me the next steps. So where do I find that I didn’t have the community. I was attending probably three to five meetup entrepreneurial meetups in Charlotte, like each week, and trying to get as much experience as I could. But I realized that the people that were there were less experienced than me. So I, you know, not to be super egotistical in that. But I would be researching online so much, you know, reading a lot of Tim Ferriss books, he’s the one that kind of kicked me off into this Freelancer world in this this mindset of like, you know, being your own boss. And I would, I would find these YouTube videos, you know, Robin Sharma, Tony Robbins, Tim Ferriss, you know, these guys really became the mentors to me. And so I would, I would seek out the mentorship that I was really desiring in all of the content that already exists online. And I think that’s what a lot of people nowadays or have been missing for a long time is, you know, the, the content is already out there. But if if we’re not really sure what to look for, that’s when we might feel a little bit lost or freelancer, especially new to the market might feel like off. It’s super overwhelming. There are roadmaps to follow, you know, the information can be curated. And that’s what we hope to do with this podcast.
Erin Swanson:
Yeah, no, I would have definitely listen to a podcast like this in that season of my life for sure. Because, I mean, and, you know, we don’t have timelines here. You don’t know, like, Aaron did this 35 years ago, or she did this five years ago, you know, because and time is so strange nowadays. Anyway, it feels like it was like, longer ago than it really was probably. But in that time, I don’t know. I mean, we had YouTube. Yes. But I don’t think it was curated in this kind of, you know, yeah. Also, we didn’t have like the know how at that time to like, go look on the internet for things like we do now. Like it’s so much more. I would say there’s so much more resources for people now to pick up and start something because there’s just so much online to like, dig through and look at and you can see you know what’s failed What hasn’t failed? And yeah, it’s just so much more.
Joshua Aguirre:
Yeah, it’s funny you say that, like if we didn’t know how to search back then because when I came up with the idea for invest, which is actually the name of our LLC, it was a combination of invent and invest. And it was. It was crafted because I was at. I was working my nine to five at RadioShack at the time, and Radio Shack radio check.
Erin Swanson:
Radio Shack, if you’re too young to know Radio Shack is googling.
Valery Aguirre:
A smaller? Yeah.
Erin Swanson:
And this guy some blockbuster stuff, too. While you’re okay, you’re getting the Radio Shack. Yeah. So
Joshua Aguirre:
I was at RadioShack and selling.
Hillary Merwin:
What phones sorry, going back to this
Valery Aguirre:
Ethernet cables.
Hillary Merwin:
disc jockeys.
Valery Aguirre:
Walkman was like he’s not selling DJs.
Joshua Aguirre:
So this is before apps were around. And before there was a lot of like, smart like IoT technology. So
Valery Aguirre:
sorry, what does IoT
Hillary Merwin:
definition break?
Joshua Aguirre:
That’s the internet of things. So when your AC unit has a computer in it,
Hillary Merwin:
AC is what? Air conditioning.
Joshua Aguirre:
And when you can tell Alexa to turn down your AC that’s using the Internet of Things, which is another network layer on top of your actual internet. Oh, wow. And so art stuff? Yeah, smart stuff, which is gonna be aI where people have
Hillary Merwin:
Oh, you just
Erin Swanson:
carry on? Don’t listen to me, Siri, just keep going.
Joshua Aguirre:
Anyway, so I came up with this idea for an automatic door lock for a deadbolt on your house where you could walk up with like a key
Erin Swanson:
member this invention and I was like, Why is no one thought of this is your most this is actually sometimes actually push the button accidentally on the car to the door? Oh, yeah, like beep beep up. That doesn’t go.
Joshua Aguirre:
Yeah. So 2007, I came up with this idea to press the remote, kind of like what you’d have with your car, and on, do the deadbolt and you’re in your house. And I was like, I don’t know how to go about creating this product. But I can envision it. So I got some graph paper, I started sketching it out. I grabbed some components from the RadioShack store and started piecing it together as best I could. But I hit a wall. And I was like, I don’t know where to go. I don’t know how to do circuitry, like, I know the basics. But at this point, I’m kind of lost. So I need somebody to prototype this. And so I just started googling a bunch of things like how do I start a company? How do I make this product? And Google wasn’t like as popular as a search engine back then in 2007? We’re using
Hillary Merwin:
Ask Jeeves. And I probably
Joshua Aguirre:
I probably did use asked
Erin Swanson:
you. We were still all using Yahoo back. When I stopped Yeah. Oh,
Hillary Merwin:
wait on here. It’s saying graphic designer phone life at Yahoo. If you want to get in touch with Aaron.
Valery Aguirre:
Okay, Hillary’s, the body@hotmail.com,
Hillary Merwin:
my personal email playing in that I share that with an audience.
Joshua Aguirre:
So at that point, I came up with an idea to help people with ideas, start companies, and I became very passionate about like the model or the roadmap that people should follow. And as I started getting more into the research, I realized there was so many different variations of this. Nobody had like a proven recipe, yet there are like really successful companies out there. So I just took the really successful companies and reverse engineered them into what recipe they used, and came up with the tools that we help with our customers today consulting
Erin Swanson:
with management. This makes me want to go way back in time to when I had my first LLC, which is not on my resume here. It was that long ago. Yes, it was when I was 14 years old.
Hillary Merwin:
If it’s not on LinkedIn, did it happen?
Erin Swanson:
I don’t think the internet was invented back in years old, actually. It’s very child, you know, it’s just a baby. It was just I had a company where I made cards by hand greeting cards, mostly of drawings of animals. And I sold them at the local pet shop on consignment. And I had an LLC called cross-eyed cards, LLC. And my parents helped me make it an LLC. So my parents had been huge mentors, as far as like business oriented stuff, because they’re both high intense sales salespeople, so they kind of know a lot of stuff. So yeah, that was my first job. My first real career job was drawing cards by hand and then I go to the store every week and I say, Oh, I sold three. And then I get you know, the bill sent it to them. They’d give me the money. right there in cash and go buy something fun. Like a
Hillary Merwin:
freelancer
Valery Aguirre:
original cheek.
Joshua Aguirre:
So what I find really impactful about your story, and to all the parents listening here, it is so positively reinforcing to teach your kids business from an early age and help them cultivate that skill set. Because if you do that early on, they will remember that for the long run. And that’s where you really get to see, you know, the raising the child and the way they they should go. And when, when they’re old enough, they won’t depart from it. So I think that’s really impactful.
Valery Aguirre:
Yeah, shout out to Aaron’s parents, your
Hillary Merwin:
parents, parents, are you listening?
Valery Aguirre:
Tune in, drop us a great review. Five stars
Hillary Merwin:
really helps to get this podcast out.
Valery Aguirre:
So you mentioned that when you were freelancing, your six plus years of freelancing, you said you were working a lot of hours. Is that right? Yeah. Because then you would have liked
Erin Swanson:
Yeah, well, it was. Yeah, it was, honestly, it was less hours in corporate, okay. So it was an improvement, okay. And they were the hours when I wanted them to be the hours. So it wasn’t necessary nine to five, it was like, start working at 10, finish, take a break in the middle of the day, then come back when you’re feeling refreshed from your swim in the afternoon, you know, whenever you were feeling like kind of getting in there doing it.
Valery Aguirre:
Okay, so it was less hours than corporate, but you would say it was more than you would have liked. Because, for instance, you mentioned the clients that red flag client that’s always like, iteration by iteration. Yeah, like, well, a lot of the paid Is that what your as you
Erin Swanson:
as you, as you progress in the business, and you have the red flag clients, over time, you’ll learn how to weed them out. So they’re never even part of your like, you can have an initial sit down with the red flag client see the flag and be like, Thank you, this was a nice meeting, but I don’t think I’m the right person for you. Sometimes you can find an alternative person who might really jive with their workflow or style or personality. And sometimes you just like, sighs they’re not gonna work for me. And so then you get clients that work just great that work in your system, they understand what a scope means they understand. So you need to build a long term report with these clients. So I mean, I had clients, the same clients for six years, like it didn’t, you know, they were the people I worked with, like on a regular everyday basis.
Hillary Merwin:
So what would you say was the biggest energy drain for you? Or that made you feel overworked at times?
Erin Swanson:
I think the biggest energy drain for me was, it’s a creative work, it’s creative work. And so without other humans to like, bounce creative ideas off of and like, do brainstorming and just have another voice in the mix of what I was thinking. There’s like you, you just tax out your own amount of content development, and then you’re like, Okay, this is as much as I could produce. And when you have, you know, a handful of clients, and you’re doing that on the regular, I think it was just not getting juiced back up creatively, was kind of the biggest strain.
Hillary Merwin:
So how do you address that juicing crisis? How do you get juiced up again?
Joshua Aguirre:
Yeah. That’s a great question. Let’s let’s play a hypothetical situation. And and don’t humor me in the answer. If you and I were to have met at the at the moment where you felt like that, that creative juice is depleting, and this is not a sustainable business for me. Would you have entertained someone who could say that they could fix that problem for you help you scale a team of creatives?
Erin Swanson:
Yes. No, I mean, my dream at that juncture would have been there was two paths I could see. One was getting above the weeds of the work having someone underneath me that I would help grow to do that work. And I would do a different part of work, which would be more of the bigger thinking of the widening of the scope, widening of the opportunities, widening of the things that we offered, or making something bigger out of it. And then the other option was to go to a company that does all that for me, and then I just get some coworkers. So I took the path of least resistance at the time, because I guess, because I just the juice was emptying and I was like I need to, you know, that’s the only path I can see myself being able to do right now. Right? But no, if there was a way to grow the business and hired people under me, and it wasn’t so freakin scary to have people beneath you that you employ and pay and stuff. That would have been an awesome journey. Yeah,
Joshua Aguirre:
yeah. So I think the moment you said scary is probably like I see entrepreneur, entrepreneurial life in a series of cliffs, and every cliff that you jump off of is like, higher than the last. It’s like free soloing. Yeah, but but in reality, every Cliff It is still a cliff. And it’s still something that you’re jumping off of. And you said something earlier that I felt like that was a huge cliff for most nine to fivers that are coming to freelancing. And you said it’s so nonchalantly, like, it was easy peasy. And I see clients that have hundreds of 1000s of dollars in gross revenue nowadays that have trouble jumping off of that cliff. So what I’m talking about specifically, is when you said, No, I just understand which clients to choose that are going to fit in my system. And I say no to the other ones, unless I can refer them out. And I think a lot of companies and business owners have trouble saying no, to money.
Erin Swanson:
Oh, yeah. Well, it didn’t come natural in the beginning, but it was something I grew into a definitely was a growing experience. But you get burned a couple times. I mean, I literally had a client who didn’t who refuse to pay me and was like, you know, it could have gone to a lawsuit, but I was like, No, I’m not I don’t have the emotional energy enough for that. So I’m just gonna learn from this to, to vet my clients a lot better. And you know, and then contracts. There’s a lot of contract building after that, for sure. And learning about contracts. And yeah, protecting yourself from that kind of thing happening. But yeah, that those are the hard knocks, bumpy roads, experiences that got me to that place where I knew how to say no,
Valery Aguirre:
well, Hillary, why is it so important to have contracts and actually read them? Like, do you really need to?
Hillary Merwin:
Well, I had a real life example. This is just to our listeners. We’re not making all this stuff up about Josh being a great mentor. And because as I’ve said, I kind of fell into the freelance world didn’t know what the heck I was doing. Struggled with lack of confidence. Didn’t really Yeah,
Erin Swanson:
actually, I roped her into the freelance world accidentally. Did
Valery Aguirre:
you? Yeah, that was, Oh, yeah.
Erin Swanson:
We all have I’m the
Hillary Merwin:
glue weight. Quick side note.
Erin Swanson:
Yeah, I was like, I’m getting out of this biz. But it’d be good for Hillary.
Hillary Merwin:
I was looking for homework. I was transitioning out of working for a nonprofit. And Aaron, who I met through life circumstance, we were friends just tagged me in a comment in a post that Josh had said he was looking for remote workers. So I got in touch with Josh and had no idea what the job even was. Just had to speak Spanish. So anyway, that’s how we all know each other. But back to the contract. So Josh likes to teach in very practical ways. So even though I have some experience under my belt, and you’ve known Josh, for how long, and I’ve known him for two, two plus years,
Joshua Aguirre:
two years, two months to you, according to your LinkedIn, okay.
Valery Aguirre:
Are you counting? Wow.
Hillary Merwin:
So even for this podcast, this is a joy. This is just hanging out and talking with friends. But I was handed a contract earlier today, to sign to sign the rights away from my beautiful voice, you can hear that it may be used.
Erin Swanson:
perpetuity.
Hillary Merwin:
And he gave me a contract and me trusting Josh just went to sign No, it was
Erin Swanson:
clearly in that same language as the beer was.
Hillary Merwin:
It was clearly stated in the contract. I just did not read it. And so he came before I could finish signing my name. He said, That was a dummy contract. It was to teach you that you need to read through the whole thing. And so he gave me a new one that did have good things to benefit me.
Erin Swanson:
Okay, can we say how stressful contracts are? Yes, like? So I’ve had contracts that I’ve actually taken to my cousin who’s a lawyer to be like, what are they telling me in this contract? Because the jargon is so
Valery Aguirre:
convoluted. Yes.
Erin Swanson:
So wonder start to like, days away as we’re reading it like it’s
Joshua Aguirre:
yeah. So actually,
Hillary Merwin:
for the listener, we’re talking about contracts with it, which is Josh’s love language. Start talking about your favorite thing in the world?
Joshua Aguirre:
Well, actually, the pain for me with contracts is that most people don’t understand them. So in our contracts with our clients, we actually break down what each clause is about in like layman’s terms. And the same way that GDPR standards have enforced when you
Hillary Merwin:
GDPR definition.
Joshua Aguirre:
GDPR know what GDPR stands for, but I will cut to that right now. General Data Protection Regulation. So yeah, so GDPR is what Mark Zuckerberg kind of tripped into when everybody was freaking out about Facebook and all the agreements that you’ve made with Facebook. And you didn’t know that you were making those agreements with Facebook with advertisers. So now when you go to like regular websites, it says, These are cookies. Do you accept them? It’s like in your face. They’re basically breaking down that policy for you and really limit layman terms and so on. Now I’m taking that same ideology and apply it to actual contracts that we write to on a daily basis for consulting or whatever. Because, you know, people that are signing like seven pages of terms and conditions deserve to know what they’re signing.
Erin Swanson:
Yeah. Back in my time, I just found something on the internet that was generic and sort of like, tweaked it up. And then I had my lawyer, cousin, you know, validate it was legit. Yeah. And then we use that. Yeah, most people do that still today. Okay. All right. I was like, please don’t put me down as a contract genius. Yeah.
Valery Aguirre:
That’s it. So that was your freelance. Experience up Josh. Any insights?
Hillary Merwin:
Well, what do you just take it away, buddy? Yeah, so some Joshua gems in here. I’m just spitballing with these coining these terms. She gets
Erin Swanson:
the microphone while you’re on camera doing that now.
Joshua Aguirre:
It’s gonna get quiet.
Hillary Merwin:
To you, dad. Alex Merwin. Josh’s jewel.
Valery Aguirre:
Jewels. Let’s not talk about Joshua’s jewels. I know Ted’s Nope, it’s a jewel. But what can you can you provide your insights? Because I know you have a lot of experience also with corporate and freelance and managing your time and those expectations.
Joshua Aguirre:
Yeah. So I think there’s something to say about the way that you prioritize finances, and in the same way that you’re jumping off a cliff and eliminating clients that don’t fit your system. I eliminate processes in people’s day to days that don’t fit their mission. And so it’s always about defining like, what they’re really trying to accomplish with their freelance career. And figuring out that culture is most important. So as they begin to generate these core values that can help grow a team that that’s the main focus, and
Valery Aguirre:
we’re gonna have to take a quick break. Quick intercession like giggling was it was it like to suck it all that beer? I’m so
Hillary Merwin:
sorry. I just got to keep off it.
Erin Swanson:
via con Dios.
Valery Aguirre:
We’ll try to keep it in English. But whatever. My other
Hillary Merwin:
you’re saying is English only for this pod for a sign language?
Valery Aguirre:
I took sign language for three years. I took it for one semester.
Hillary Merwin:
Aaron as an audio podcast, can you show us some signs? You know, can you say goodbye in sign language? Very good.
Joshua Aguirre:
ASMR
Valery Aguirre:
thanks so much for being with us today. We’ve really enjoyed everything. So fast. Thanks so much Aaron for sharing about your freelance experience in corporate life and nine to five worlds because that’s all very too much talking. I was a lot of
Hillary Merwin:
like some background music as you say it. Yeah.
Valery Aguirre:
Aaron, thank you so much for coming out and sharing your experience in the work life.
Erin Swanson:
Thanks for having me about. Hillary. Josh.
Valery Aguirre:
Let’s hold Let’s hold hands and skip who by you have. Word is dance right. I hope you have the time.
Joshua Aguirre:
Alright guys, we just need three more. Thanks for joining us on today’s episode. If you would like to get in touch with Aaron, you can visit her LinkedIn in the episode description below. Before I let you go, I just want to acknowledge that the state of the world is pretty crazy right now. From the East Palestine issues to the countless systemic issues facing our society and others around the world. The other day, I had the privilege of talking with some folks in Denver, and we were talking about creating solutions to solving some of the world’s toughest problems and how to mobilize people to get there. If this sounds like it’s up your alley, come join us as a guest on the podcast and I’ll help you personally to build a business model around your impact project and teach you how to look for unique funding strategies to scale. Go to scaling side hustles.com to fill out the form. We’ll be back again in two weeks with new episodes launching every Tuesday instead of Monday. Just because we’re changing things up a little bit, stay safe and keep hustling everybody.