17 Jan, 2018

Keeping Your Sanity as a Solopreneur, Part Three: Be Multipassionate

By |2021-08-19T20:08:05-04:00January 17th, 2018|Categories: Consulting|Tags: , |0 Comments

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Welcome to Part Three of the Keeping Your Sanity as a Solopreneur series. In Part One, we tackled mindset by busting some common myths about transitioning from employee to self employed, and in Part Two I shared some of my current tools and processes that help me run my business. Today, let’s discuss what happens when you think you have too many ideas (aka being multipassionate.)

What does it mean to be “multipassionate”? 

The term “multipassionate entrepreneur” was coined by Marie Forleo. As someone who has worked on Wall Street, as a dance choreographer and fitness trainer for Crunch Fitness, a life coach, and more, Marie knows a thing or two about having multiple strengths and passions that she’s turned into revenue streams.

I jokingly tell people that my business started as a blog. When I started blogging in 2011, all I cared about what sharing my opinion on feminism, reproductive justice, and women and girls of color. By the time I started entertaining the idea of working for myself, I had added more of my voice as a social worker, program designer and evaluator into my blog pieces.

I started following Marie and other influencers like Rosetta Thurman of Happy Black Woman, Rachel Rodgers of Hello Seven, social media coach and trainer Natalie Gouche, and more. I also looked into my inner circle to gain inspiration from my friends Chanel Jaali, Taja Lindley, Miriam Zoila Pérez, and Arielle Loren. I even joined Marie’s B School program, and had the chance to join a mastermind group led by web designer and brand strategist Kriss Rowly. Each of these people have built a name and brand around multiple passions.

I saw the most obvious benefit of being multipassionate: I can a business and life around the things I care about most. Also, having multiple passions can lead to generating multiple streams of income for my business. But what I learned was that, while the idea of being multipassionate was exciting, I felt a little all over the place.

So, I inadvertently created this process to help me to identify how to make it all come together (or do some downsizing):

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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

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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

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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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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

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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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2 Aug, 2017

Ask Nicole: 4 Ways to Become Better at What You Do

By |2021-08-19T19:45:05-04:00August 2nd, 2017|Categories: Consulting|Tags: , |0 Comments

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No one starts out knowing every thing. It takes a while to get there. And when you finally obtain a level of mastery, there will always be more opportunities to hone your skills and expertise.

If you become frustrated because you feel like a novice, amateur or (even worse) a fraud, you’ll never realize your full potential. If you believe that you know everything there is to know, you prevent yourself from learning new ways of approaching your work.

Here are 4 ways to become better at what you do:

Surround yourself with people who are better at what you do 

This can be a little intimidating, but if you shift your perspective from one of intimidation to one of opportunity and a willingness to learn, it can be priceless.

One of the benefits of surrounding yourself with people who have a higher level of expertise and/or who have been in your field for some time is that it allows you to not only learn their way of thinking; you can learn about the pitfalls they may have encountered while on the road to honing their knowledge. You probably won’t dodge bullets completely, but you’ll be able to spot those pitfalls more quickly.

Heads-Up: It’s very common to be so inspired by someone else that we may imitate them. Interestingly, you will notice that surrounding yourself with people who are better at what you do often leads to developing your voice from their perspective. Your blogging, podcasting, speaking, social media presence, and more may take on the tone of that person(s). However, the more your confidence grows, the more you’ll be able to develop your own voice and perspective while still being inspired by the people who helped you along the way.

Find paid, free and low-cost opportunities for training and professional development 

Back when I had a day job, I LOVED going to one-day or multi-day trainings, many were local to my area and were free. Mostly because it allowed me to be away from the office. I also enjoyed when my employer would invite trainers to the office who facilitated on interesting topics. (Maybe being away from my desk and not doing any work is why I enjoyed those, too).

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