10 Jan, 2018

Keeping Your Sanity as a Solopreneur, Part Two: Tools & Processes

By |2021-08-19T20:07:27-04:00January 10th, 2018|Categories: Consulting|Tags: , |0 Comments

Have a question? Let me know.

Welcome to Part Two of the Keeping Your Sanity as a Solopreneur series. In Part One, we tackled mindset by busted some common myths about transitioning from employee to self employed. Today, I’m going to share some of tools I’ve been using to keep myself organized, along with some processes I’m constantly tweaking so I can spend less time on mundane tasks.

But first, spoiler alert:

You’ll always be testing and tweaking

Solopreneurs tend to be very DIY, and when it comes to keeping organized, getting paid on time, and knowing what I’m doing from day to day, I’m always testing out tools and processes, integrating them into my business, finding another tool or process that can potentially make my life easier, and trying that out. If you’re like me and like doing test runs for a period of time to test the waters, this may be fun for you. Some things work out, while others don’t. And some things you’ll know right off the bat aren’t for you. It’s like trying out a new face cleanser that breaks you out after 1-2 uses.

First, let’s start with tools. These are either tools I’ve been using for some time or are currently testing out.

Note: This isn’t a sponsored post nor does this post contain any affiliate links. In fact, these businesses, influencers, and developers have no idea that I’m sharing their products with you. Some of these tools are paid products while others are free (and there are plenty of free alternatives for some paid products, in some cases). Also, since my business centers on providing services rather than products (for the time being), this post centers more on that, though I feel these tools can also apply to product developers. Now that that’s out of the way:

Tools

Website

Your website is your virtual business card. It gives people a sense of what your business offers and also gives them a glimpse into your personality.

  • Website Hosting: Bluehost– I’ve been using Bluehost for several years now. When I transferred my website hosting and domain name from Go Daddy, I found the process to be very seamless and straightforward. I’ve noticed that Bluehost is routinely doing maintenance which sometimes gets in the way of my website loading, and when this happens, I’m always met with very courteous customer service providers that are understanding and prompt. Another feature I enjoy is BlueHost’s one-click WordPress install to create a WordPress site via Bluehost.
  • Website Content Management: WordPress– I often tell people that my business first started as a blog. A Tumblr blog, specifically. I started blogging in 2011 on Tumblr, and while I liked Tumblr, it didn’t have the functionality I needed and trying to get widgets to work in the themes I tested out sucked. When I noticed’s BlueHost’s one-click WordPress install feature, I immediately switched over to WordPress. Note the difference between WordPress.com versus WordPress.org. WordPress.org requires you to have your own web server, whereas WordPress.com can be hosted by Bluehost or whichever host you use. I’ve found WordPress easy to set up and navigate, but many website developers are very proficient in building WordPress sites. Creating blog posts and website pages is a breeze, and WordPress routinely updates my website so that I have the latest in functionality. Also, WordPress has lots of free themes, but I found myself more attracted to premium themes, like the next tool.
  • Website Theme: Avada– Whenever I would find a website design that I liked, I would wonder, “What WordPress theme is that?”. Turns out there’s a website to help you figure that out. Also, many of the designs I liked were made with Avada. I have fun creating my website and relaunching it in November 2015, and I’ve gotten compliments on how clean my site looks and how easy it is to navigate. If spending time designing a website isn’t your thing, many developers are knowledgeable on Avada and other themes.

Invoice and Accounting 

Getting paid and tracking your expenses and time can be a drawn out process. Or not.

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3 Jan, 2018

Keeping Your Sanity as a Solopreneur, Part One: Mindset

By |2021-08-19T20:07:16-04:00January 3rd, 2018|Categories: Consulting|Tags: , |2 Comments

Have a question? Let me know.

2018 will mark 2 years for me in full-time self-employment. For my one year anniversary in May 2017, I shared 10 lessons learned in my first year self-employment.

Those 10 lessons haven’t changed much since I shared them, but for the next three months in the Ask Nicole series, I’m going to speak about three important aspects of self-employment, from the perspective of a solopreneur.

A solopreneur is a business owner who works and runs her or his own business alone. Different from an entrepreneur (who goes through more traditional means of building an running a business), a solopreneur can choose whether to contract out or outsource certain types of work they may not have the skillset for or the time/patience to do).

Over the past few months, I’ve seen several friends and colleagues make the leap into working for themselves. It’s exciting to see! I’ve offered to share with them aspects of my journey, lessons learned, and tools that are currently working for me.

Five themes have come up when I’ve spoken with my friends–mindset, tools and processes, ways to bring in income, support, and work/life balance–and I’m going to touch on each one this month. Today, let’s talk about what I think is the most important aspect of maintaining your sanity as a solopreneur: Mindset.

Transitioning from Employee to Self Employed

With the exception of one family member, no one in my immediate life at the time had worked for themselves. Plus, I come from a family of employees that stay with their employer until retirement. When you don’t see examples of what you want to do, it’s easy to think that what you want isn’t feasible.

When I started thinking more about building my consulting business, it was with the intention of wanting to make extra income on the side. When I got to the point where I enjoyed working with my consulting clients and getting paid for speaking engagements (essentially #ReclaimingMyTime) more so than doing work that someone else handed to me, I started fantasizing about how working for myself could look like. I also sought out people who were working for themselves. When you see people doing what you want to do, it’s easier to imagine it for yourself.

And as it turns out, handing in your resignation letter is the easy part. Transitioning from employee to self employed is as much a mental game as it is a physical one.

Solopreneur myths, busted (and what to put in their place)

There are lots of myths out there about solopreneurs. Here are some common ones:

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15 Nov, 2017

Are You Focusing on The Process or The Impact?

By |2021-08-19T20:00:56-04:00November 15th, 2017|Categories: Strategic Planning & Sustainability|Tags: , |0 Comments

Over the past year, I’ve become intentional in transitioning away from focusing solely on designing and implementing evaluations to working with my clients on building their capacity to do it all themselves.

And sometimes, I like to offer aspect of my services for free as a way of establishing a connection with a potential client. From a skills perspective, this helps me keep everything sharp. From a networking perspective, this puts me on the radar for future paid consulting work and referrals.

Recently, I offered to revised an evaluation tool for an organization providing small grants to community groups seeking to reduce abortion stigma. They want to develop an easy-to-understand evaluation tool that measures stigma pre and post grantee project interventions and measures overall project success.They are finding their current tool–a survey requiring grantees to provide open-ended answers–to be challenging for most of their grantees to understand, and want something that makes the process of giving feedback easier to obtain and to analyze.

In my work with past and current evaluation clients, some themes I’ve observed related to evaluation are A) a level of anxiety around evaluation as a whole given that evaluation tends to get a bad reputation, B) an interest in developing engaging ways to gather feedback that builds confidence in evaluation, and allows them to do the necessary follow-up with staff and the stakeholders, C) a question in how to implement feedback, or D) a mixture of A, B and C.

I see this more so with clients who are more grassroots or have a community organizing background as they ultimately go by direct community engagement for feedback, rather than on evaluations. Also, there is a sense of feeling protective of their programs, services, and campaigns, and no one wants to see that what they’re doing isn’t resonating with the communities they serve. So, finding a way to gather meaningful feedback and be objective of feedback that may be interpreted as negative is a balancing act.

For some background information, grantees receive small grants to develop a project/intervention that speaks to a level of abortion stigma: individual, community, institutional, media, and policy. Grantees have free reign to create what they want, with support from the organization, I made some preliminary edits to the organization’s evaluation tool, and provided some additional feedback:

First, before starting any process, understand what you want to evaluate. In this organization’s case, the current tool focuses more on the process the grantees went through in developing their project/intervention from conception to implementation. This is called a process evaluation.

An impact evaluation, on the other hand, would focus on the impact the grantees’ interventions had on their target audience(s). If a grantee expects A to occur as a result of their target audience(s)being exposed to their projects, did it really happen? If not, what factors may have contributed to this and how can they be addressed.

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1 Nov, 2017

Ask Nicole: How Can I Be More Culturally Responsive?

By |2021-08-19T20:06:50-04:00November 1st, 2017|Categories: Consulting|Tags: , , |0 Comments

Have a question you’d like to be featured? Let me know.

Two months ago, I facilitated an evaluation meeting for one of my clients. The client, an organization that specializes in community-based  health peer-to-peer training related to pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding and early parenting, received funding for a multi-year birth equity project that also includes program evaluation capacity building.

During the meeting, the staff and I had a conversation about the various aspects of program evaluation, from planning and implementation, to data interpretation and measuring impact.

A takeaway message I gave to the staff is that, try as we might, it can be difficult to design and implement and evaluation process that is unbiased. Why? Situational Awareness.

In the general sense, situational awareness is being aware of your surroundings. This keep you on your toes and more likely to sense danger. In the context of program evaluation, situational awareness can help you spot red flags as well as help you become aware of not only your surroundings, but also what your presence is adding to that environment.

So, I asked the staff:

“How can you and your organization become more culturally responsive?”

Many under sourced communities are already leery of researchers, evaluators and anyone coming to their community to collect data. As a Black person and as a woman, you’d think it would be easy for me to go into a community where I share the same race and/or gender. But sometimes, that can be where the commonality ends.

There’s a power dynamic at play, intimidation, a history of mistrust of researchers and evaluators, and the lived experiences of marginalized communities being viewed as subjects or statistics rather people with important and valuable stories to tell. And I’m at a point in my personal and professional life where I can acknowledge the various levels of privilege and power I have.

It’s very easy to become comfortable with our commonalities, because those commonalities can be the “in” we need into a community setting. But you still have to do the work before, during, and after to ensure you’re being as intentionally responsive to a community’s culture as possible. And “culture” is more than just race/ethnicity. It encompasses age, gender identity, religion, language, ability, sexual preference, geographic region, physical and mental health, how an organization operates, and more.

More importantly, you have to be aware of your biases and motivations, as well as know who has the power, money, and political ties to make decisions within the organization you’re working with and within the communities they serve. You also have to know the systems people are operating under that can impact cultural responsiveness. Just as I reflect after a project has ended, I also pinpoint the context that a project is operating within before I start a project and during the project. Here’s a 3-part reflective process I use to reflect on my level of cultural responsiveness. These questions are adaptable to any situation where you’re interacting with a client and a community or cultural group:

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19 Oct, 2017

Should I Pass You the Mic, Or Speak For You?

By |2021-08-19T19:58:15-04:00October 19th, 2017|Categories: Equity & Justice|Tags: , |0 Comments

With the rise of storytelling as a form of advocacy and resistance, and various forms of research and evaluation that place communities, researchers, and evaluators on the same playing field gaining in popularity, I’ve been refining my thinking and processes in develop more effective strategies for centering the voices and lived experiences of women and girls of color.

When I’m working with my clients, I always have in the back of my mind who I’m really working for. And it’s not my clients. My clients are essentially the gatekeepers. They provide the programs, services, and initiatives that are designed to reach women and girls of color.  Depending on what I’m doing with clients, I’m tasked with finding ways to engage women and girls of color to share their experiences in order to measure the program, service, or initiative’s impact. But before I’m an evaluator or program designer, I’m an activist and community organizer.

The Center for Evaluation Innovation’s 2010 brief, “Grassroots Action and Learning for Social Change: Evaluating Community Organizing”, posits that evaluating advocacy initiatives and community organizing campaigns should be participatory, more prospective rather than less retrospective, learning-based, culturally responsive, and less academic. The brief also shares a framework for evaluating community organizing campaigns, which includes:

  • Craft evaluation questions that are relevant and useful to organizers to generate buy-in and participation
  • Set clear yet flexible interim benchmarks that focus on outcomes related to various organizing components (such as participation and membership, organizing wins, and organizational capacity)
  • Utilize data collection methods that fit the style of the organization and tailored to capture various components of organizing
  • Develop buy-in and trust for successful implementation
  • Set achievable expectations to maximize learning and sustainability
  • Use evaluation results to create impact
  • Clarify what “success” means

Innovative and engaging frameworks and methods like these is what making program design and evaluation fun for me. And you’d think that processes like these are a no-brainer, but they aren’t for many organizations and communities.

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