Developing a freelance career: what to expect
In this episode I talk to Liam, a freelance content marketer, an advocate of making mistakes, optimising opportunities and giving everything a go, Liam takes us on his journey to a full-time freelancing career
Participants
In order of first appearance:
- Emily Slade - podcast producer and host, Prospects
- Liam Taylor - freelance content marketer
Transcript
Emily Slade: Hello and welcome to Future You, the podcast brought to you by graduate careers experts Prospects. I'm your host, Emily Slade and in this episode I talk Liam Taylor, a freelance content marketer. He talks about his journey into becoming a fulltime freelancer, the pitfalls and problems he encountered along the way, things that worked out well, and advice for anyone thinking of doing it themselves.
Liam Taylor: So I'm Liam Taylor. I am a freelance content marketing professional. I also have a background in education, arts, education and music, music production, music composition. I'm here today to talk about freelancing. Why it's a good idea. Why it's maybe the best idea.
Emily Slade: Not that you're biased or anything.
Liam Taylor: I'm so biased, that will come across.
Emily Slade: Incredible. So let's start with your journey so far to becoming a freelancer did you go to university what's what's going on there?
Liam Taylor: So no university. I did do further education. So, let me see I did secondary school, not high school, secondary school, because Cambridge, secondary school, I did two years of sixth form, I studied very employable subjects, like philosophy and classics. I got kind of sick in my first year, glandular fever, which takes ages to get over. So I sort of didn't do particularly well, in my exams. So I think university would have been an option. But I kind of, I was sort of off the idea of education, the only the only reason I went back and completed my A levels was because my parents convinced me well, it's free. If you wait, any amount of time, you're gonna have to pay even to complete these courses. So probably finish it. And if you if you mess it up, it's not the end of the world, you tried whatever. So I got, I think, a couple a levels and then just went straight into work. So I had like retail jobs for a few years. And what was cool about that was it kind of gave me the headspace to realise, Oh, what am I actually into? What do I think I'm good at what would I like to get better at. And I realised, actually, music is something I'm rather fond of. But I don't just want to be one of those people that has a music career out of nothing, because I sort of don't believe that's real. I'm gonna go study music. And I found this lovely course in Norwich, actually a place called, well, it's now called Access Creative. It was called Access To Music at the time. And what was good about Access To Music was it didn't just teach you how to play your instrument. There were music history, lessons, music, business lessons, music promotion, and you get to you basically get placed into a band. And then that is your band for two years, more or less. And you record music with that band, you do gigs with that band, you get like graded on stage craft, as well as like, how well does he play guitar? He plays guitar very well, but he doesn't move. So you know. So that was quite interesting. And what was particularly interesting to me about that course was I, I thought I was an excellent guitar player. Now. I was fine. I was absolutely fine. But I could not compete. There were some ridiculous players there. And some of them were like five years younger than me.
Emily Slade: And one of them was Ed Sheeran.
Liam Taylor: Ed Sheeran was in the year above me, I think. But I don't remember. I'm not going to claim to know you, Ed. Don't worry. Yeah, so I had to kind of find other ways to compete. So in a musical way, the way I competed was getting sort of good with music theory and composition. So I couldn't like shred but maybe my note choice was a little more interesting. And I was also getting into kind of the business side of music, and kind of how one might use social media, to, you know, market your band, how can you stand out there's like guerrilla tactics of well, you can you can turn up and play anywhere if you're brave enough. So you know, how would you go about doing that sort of thing?
Emily Slade: Was this at a time when social media was..? Well, what sort of era of social media are we at here? I don't want to like name and shame you.
Liam Taylor: No, that's fine. I'm trying to think I imagine this would have been the early 2010s.
Emily Slade: Okay. So Instagram's around?
Liam Taylor: YouTube was definitely around. We didn't really know it was gonna turn into what it is now. Definitely Twitter was there. I think Instagram was maybe emerging at that time. So there yeah, there are a lot of conversations about well, how can we use YouTube? SoundCloud was the big one at the time. I think that been around a little bit. So having left Access To Music, I was teaching guitar privately in my parents living room. And what I ended up doing was I don't know if you've ever tried to teach someone guitar, but between lessons, they sort of don't care. They say they want to learn but they just want to be good immediately, which is not how skills work. So what I did was I ended up recording. I kind of got like a rough syllabus together. So there was a handful of students that I would all be teaching basically the same thing. So I could record a video of okay, this is how the scale works. This is the, this is the exercise I've given you, I want you to try it at this tempo, then this tempo. If it sounds like this, you're doing really well, you might, you might fall over at this point in which case try this. So then that was kind of a way to sort of keep people engaged. So I started what would become the LT guitarist YouTube channel, at that point, and I, that was, I guess, the first social media thing I was actively doing, but I wasn't doing it to be like, oh, yeah, give me subscribers. It was more about I'm trying to like, do like a value add for these students, I guess. And then actually, what happened over time was that YouTube channel kind of grew. So I started doing stuff that was for YouTube, rather than for students. I think around about the same time I was running live music nights, which I was bad at. And sort of learn a lot of lessons about how to how to use Twitter, how to use Facebook, how to use Facebook events, Facebook, advertising, these kinds of things. So that was kind of the period where I made loads of mistakes. And you know, I'm a big advocate of mistakes. So I don't, I don't regret those mistakes. But it's yeah, you know, it was an opportunity to learn. And I think if I were to think back, if I knew at the time, oh, I'm making mistakes, it's fine. I'm gonna grow and develop at the time. It's just frustrating. Why isn't everyone at this gig. And then about that same time, I got hired to make a podcast. And I use that word loosely, because we didn't really have podcasts, then we sort of, I think, really sort of high tech nerdy dudes might have known what a podcast was, we just, I got hired to make this kind of show for arts and music magazine, sort of off the back of being involved in local gigs. And we uploaded it to Mixcloud, which is like SoundCloud, except you haven't heard of it. And these days, I think Mixcloud is is more specifically for kind of DJs to like, upload their sets. I don't know why we did it. I think they were like restrictions on what you could upload to SoundCloud at the time. So we just went with whatever platform we could put it on. And then over time, that project ran out of money, which happens to a lot of arts projects. And we sort of decided actually, it might be kind of nice to keep this sort of thing going. So we came up with a music blog. So our sort of background with with running events kind of turned into this music blog. And there was a little podcast for that where we would interview like local bands and touring bands and stuff. So really straightforward sort of interview format, not dissimilar to what we're doing now for interview format podcast, again, hosted on Mixcloud for some reason. And that was kind of the first constant kind of routine social media content that I was making kind of at the same time as doing the LT guitarist music stuff. That podcast would eventually turn into the Conversation Hat, which is still going now. And where are we? I can't really put up but that probably takes us up to about 2014 I guess 2014 I got a job a part time job as a Music and Performing Arts technician which is a little bit like a specialist TA. I guess, if you went to high school, you you may have seen like science technicians like the people that live in a cupboard and only come out to arrange beakers. It was that kind of thing. But for for keyboards and mics and stuff. So I spent a bit of my time fixing stuff, fixing the same three guitars that would have the same problem every time because kids don't know how to work guitars, which is fine. That's why they hired me. Sometimes teaching kids one on one, which is fine because I've taught guitar previously. And the difference here is that they're already in school so they can't run away from my lesson or just not turn up. And a little bit of kind of music ICT so trying to get this computer suite together. And we were using like a 10 year old version of Pro Tools on computers that was not built for either of those things. So trying to like yeah, really get blood from the stone that is a 10 year old version of Pro Tools and 14 year olds don't really want to do that. So that was a really fun job. There were lots of cool opportunities. Even though it was a part time thing like I got to take kids to perform at Royal Albert Hall. Like really cool stuff like this. And because it was part time it meant that I could do silly online stuff like Conversation Hat podcast, trying to make comedy sketches, release music, keep doing the the LT guitarist YouTube stuff. And that was I kind of late I've reached the fact that I've been doing these music interviews for so long to get interviews with like some of my favorite artists, I managed to talk to Dan le Sac, of Dan le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip? I got an interview with him, which became like, I think the only episode of that particular podcast. There's just one single episode. And it's me talking to Dan le Sac, which is a lot of fun. So kind of, yeah, leveraging my background in that kind of journalism to get some cool people on board. What does that take us to...that takes us to lock down. So lock down was really interesting, because I sort of realised I had been in that job for too long, it was close to eight years. There were some cool opportunities. But I don't know if you've looked at. I mean, education as an industry is kind of tricky, especially at secondary level, because there's just no money. So it was kind of a case of well, do I stay here in case the whole industry gets better? Which it probably won't? Or do I just pack it in and do something else like, well, what would I do if I were to pack it all in? And I think it was 2021. That is sort of decided? Yeah, it was kind of the summer of 2021. I was like, No, I'm gonna quit. This isn't this isn't fun anymore, the money isn't worth it, there's no opportunities, it's only going to get worse. So I came up with a plan, I was smart, I had a plan. And then I quit, which was the right way to do that. I realised actually all of the skills that I've developed so that the social media staff, the YouTube, the podcasting. Because I was quite good at the YouTube stuff, it meant I knew how to use the DSLR. So in theory, I could take photos as well. I'd spent eight years trying to get teenagers to care about things they don't care about. So I was quite good at like, encouraging language, but also talking in quite a simple fashion. So these kinds of communication skills and the kind of creative media stuff, I sort of eventually realised, oh, that's, that's a little bit like advertising is a bit like marketing. And because what everyone's trying to do business on online at the moment, so actually, a digital marketing career might be a smart thing to do. So I saw I packed that job in October 2022. I think mid October 2022, was my last working day. And I basically spent two or three months learning as much as I could, because I've been doing stuff online for ages. But I didn't know like the technical language. I didn't know like all of these acronyms. I didn't know what they were. So I kind of spent a few months formalising this stuff that I knew. So I could describe it in a way that someone else in marketing knew what I was doing. And then I managed to get my first two clients, I think, February of 2022. And that is pretty much what I've been doing. Since then, when I started out whilst trying to get those couple clients, I had some audio tech work. So there was there was a backlog of Cambridge University graduations because of lock down. If you go to Cambridge, you want the fancy Latin graduation. That's the whole point. So they were there weren't really restrictions on people attending the ceremonies. But there were restrictions on travel to get into the country. So we I got hired to do this backlog of tech for Cambridge University graduation. So I was literally just sitting by an audio desk waiting for one person to speak Latin. And then when they're done, turn their fader down. Next fader up for the next person to speak Latin. It's very important that people on the other side of the world heard this Latin apparently. So that was a little bit of work that I had off the back of doing sort of audio tech for secondary schools for eight years. And I also did some work on Fiverr writing batches of jokes for social media, so not so kind of copywriting but the idea was that a company would say my industry is this. We don't have content for social media. So if you could write us 20 jokes around this subject, that'd be great. I stopped doing that because people from non English speaking countries didn't get the jokes I was writing. Yeah, I I'm not going to sit here and explain why. It doesn't feel fun. So I just sort of stopped doing Fiverr because of that.
Emily Slade: Could you briefly just describe what Fiverr is.
Liam Taylor: Fiverr is a website where it started out you couldn't pay someone to do very nearly anything for you for five pound. So for example, if you are setting up a record shop and you need a logo, you can, in theory, hire someone to make you a logo for five pounds. And in reality that costs a lot more than five pounds. So in recent years, it's become a system of well, if you want this kind of if you want to spend this long making a logo, it look a bit like this, and it'll cost you 100 pound, whatever. It's that same sort of thing. So I had tiers,, I had a five pound tier which was I will write you a single joke, and it might not be good, even in English. I will do that for a fiver. So if you're not sure what kind of service you're going to get out of me, it'll only cost you a fiver. And I only receive like three pound of that. So it's really low risk, just to try it out. Yeah, that's basically what Fiverr is. It's really good for some things.
Emily Slade: When you were teaching guitar in your parents living room, had you set yourself up as a sort of self employed teacher? Was that the first the first entry into self employment for you?
Liam Taylor: So in a legal sense, no, because I wasn't earning enough money for it to be HMRC's problem, basically. So it was kind of me doing word of mouth, posting adverts on musicteacher.co.uk I did make flyers as well. But I would be shocked if any of them helped. Because I didn't know how flyers worked back then.
Emily Slade: And then you've you talked about various sort of side hustles along the way, were they making you any money? Did Conversation Hat bring in any money or any of these little projects you were doing? Were they financially successful or just skill expanding?
Liam Taylor: It was pretty much just skill expanding. I wasn't really seeking to earn money through them. Over the years Conversation Has sort of grew to a point where we have like a nice little family of Patreon supporters at the moment. So a few years ago, it became necessary to create Odd Creative Limited. So once we had that company, we could also do like, bespoke media. And that was actually I suppose I sort of forget that I did that. Well, that's not on my notes. Weird. Yeah, Odd Creative was a company I founded whilst working in schools so that I could do these kind of like advertising filmmaking things, we never really had many gigs. The main reason or the creative, was founded as a limited liability company was so that the Patreon money we get from Conversation Hat that could go somewhere, and then we would pretty much everything we've made from Patreon would go back into the podcast in some way, whether that's new microphones, whether that's recording space, website hosting, stickers, you know, all of these things, you need to have a podcast. And that was kind of the point of the Conversation Hat. It was never a money making venture. I'm one of the few people that started a podcast, not trying to make money from it. If Tik Tok is to be believed, so I yeah, that was never the goal. So everything kind of just went back into the podcast and that kind of, you know, learning how to. Okay, am I am I going to make a bunch of flyers for the Conversation Hat as well? How do you make flyers? How do you get people's attention in a helpful way? It was, yeah, they made money, but it was more about learning. I'm also one of these people, if I'm not being creative in some way, I get physically uncomfortable. So it was kind of a way to scratch that itch as well.
Emily Slade: And when you did hit post pandemic era, where you moved more into sort of digital marketing, why did you choose to almost become a self employed person with their own company, rather than join a company as a digital marketer?
Liam Taylor: It was mostly about opportunity. I was looking for jobs work in that field, but we're talking, I would be in my early 30s, you know, I need to make a certain amount of money. And if you've not already got, like, a proven history in a field, you're only going to get internships and digital marketing is one of those fields were like, Oh, they will exploit you. So it's very much a I, I'm gonna get these kind of micro credentials. And kind of build up a kind of client base based on word of mouth as much as possible. And then hopefully, if I get to a point where I do need to get like a contracted job, I will have had like a proven history and I'll just go about it my own way. My life is a long list of me trying to do things the wrong way. I'm a big believer in that as well. And then just you know, when little opportunities come up, making sure I'm really making the most out of those. And a good example is one of the first music teachers I worked for, ended up working at the Royal Opera House. Lovely guy, but complete technophobe. So anytime we were at school together, he would ask me to do you know, video editing, audio editing, can you please I don't know which way in the HDMI goes, you know, anything like that. So when he needed a video editor at Royal Opera House, I was kind of top of the list. So, and that's been quite a regular little bit of work as well. And it's not like, I wouldn't say that strictly speaking, digital marketing, it's video editing, which is is not not digital marketing in the same pool, same sort of pool, same sort of skill set, just a different application, I guess. So being able to have the Royal Opera House logo on my LinkedIn on my website is quite helpful. So anytime those that are opportunities come along, making sure that you know, really signposting them to people that come along, and quite often I will have, okay, tell me about the way he did the Royal Opera House. It's kind of boring, but absolutely.
Emily Slade: Amazing. So let's dive in now to what went wrong? What are your top three mistakes, when you started becoming a freelancer?
Liam Taylor: I wrote them down because there's so many. Only three, are you kidding? I mean, there's really, there's really silly things like, I should have charged more money when I was starting out, but I didn't have the confidence to know what I was worth, I didn't have the confidence to, to look at what, you know, if someone went to a company, what they would charge compared to what you're going to me, I can provide you a higher level of service, because I'm physically standing in your shop with you, this company, you will never meet the people that are doing your marketing for you. But they're charging so much more. So that was something I never realised. One thing that I don't know if this is really a mistake, it's just something I'm quite conscious of is I don't have a great online presence, myself as a digital marketer. Because when I'm in the mood to do digital marketing things, I'm basically doing those for clients. So I don't have the bandwidth to do that for myself. I've got I've got a pretty pretty solid brand, as LT guitarist as this kind of musician and educator online. So I'm happy, really happy with how I come across, like, musically in that way. But I'm quite conscious that I didn't put a lot of groundwork into me as a marketer. And my excuse is I'm too busy doing that for other people to do it for myself. Emily Slade: Do you think it's a necessity? If somebody wanted to develop a freelance career as a digital marketer? Would you recommend that they build an online presence before going out into the world? Or did it not really matter? As long as you can find clients? But is it a case of you're not going to get the clients unless you have the online presence?
Liam Taylor: So what worked for me is being able to prove, well, look, this is the marketing that I've been doing for my music projects. This is the marketing that I've been doing for the Conversation Hat podcast, things like that. I point out, this is what I did for this. This is why it works. So I've built my own. What's it called?
Emily Slade: Portfolio?
Liam Tyler: Portfolio of case studies. That's it. So if you don't have the opportunity to do that, for a project you've made for yourself, or for like your aunties bakery or something, for example, it's probably worth like investing in your own personal brand as a marketer. So I think, yeah, for some people, I think that's going to be a necessity. Definitely. Another big mistake was not realising that what clients say they want, and what they actually want are rarely the same thing.
Emily Slade: Oh, wow.
Liam Tyler: I have so many conversations about, let me explain why you don't want a viral video. It's not going to help in any way you might get some views, but it's not actually going to do anything. So pretty much all of the time. What clients want is for their business to make more money, of course, and you know, as British people, we're sort of taught to talk about money. It's weird. But actually, no companies want to make more money. I think it's okay to say that. So when when a client says to me, I would really like to increase our reach on Tik Tok like, Okay, why, though? So, the way that I have those conversations is to sort of engage with it initially, at face value, like, Okay, you want a viral video. So what kind of things would happen in this viral video? How would you want to go about this? What would be like your target? And what would the outcome be? And then when they tell you the outcome, you say, there's a much more cost effective way to get that outcome. It's this. It might go viral. It won't, but it might. So yeah, trying to interpret what they say they want because these are the words They've heard on TV. Yeah, of course versus while the outcome I want is even if it's, for example, Oh, I'd love it. If we could grow the company to a point where we have more opportunities for our staff. We have like, a nice, Nescafe coffee maker rather than a rusty old kettle. It's like, okay, what you're saying is you want more money? That's fine. Let's try and get you more money. And they'll have an idea of where we want to, we want to do that through social video or increase in brand awareness. And then yeah, so quite often, I'll entertain it at face value for a little bit. And then when we don't get the results, they're expecting say, okay, well, I have this alternative that might yield results, we tried your thing didn't work. Let's try this other thing.
Emily Slade: And are these things that you've just picked up along the way because of your own trial and errors throughout the last sort of 20 years of your working life?
Liam Taylor: Pretty much. So I had some YouTube videos that did rather well, quite early on. And almost no knock on effects to any of my other videos. So I've got a fair few subscribers, but not many views, for example, on certain YouTube channels, just because people come along for this one particular video. But then there's no follow on, I only do one of those kinds of videos, so people aren't going to stick around for more things like that. So try and explain to clients, we can absolutely do that. But you're right. It's it is pretty much just my own trial and error. Having been playing around at the Internet, poking things, taking on things, see what things what happens when you do certain things online. Yeah, this is why I'm a big advocate of mistakes. And having like my own, the LT guitarist brand and the Conversation Hat brand means I can go make those mistakes. I don't have to make those mistakes on my clients time. I've already done. Emily Slade: So the other end of that spectrum, what are your top three wins since becoming a freelancer?
Liam Taylor: It's a little bit corny, but leaving the security of contracted work in the first place was big. Because I'd been at that place for I've been at this school for eight years, I was really friendly with a lot of the staff and really liked the kids. So it was it was a really tough decision. Even though it was part time work, it took up like a lot of kind of emotional energy a lot of my time. So kind of knowing, right, I'm not making a lot of money, but I know exactly how much money I get at the end of every month, leaving that security for who knows what, more money less money, no money, like really no way to know. So that was quite big. And the next big win after that was I think it took me a total of four months to be making as much money freelancing as I was with that job, which is pretty quick turnaround. It also highlights just how little money I was making. That's the main story there. But I think that that's quite nice. Like within within a sort of, what's that, a third of a year? I can't do maths. Within a bit of a year, kind of to be back where I was, but doing it entirely by myself inside the work that I've created for myself. I was really proud of that.
Emily Slade: What was the choice behind that. You were working part time, in theory you could have become a freelance digital marketing manager in your days off, why did you make the choice to leave the structure and safety net and dive in without one?
Liam Taylor: So I was doing that a little bit - the YouTube channel and the Conversation Hat podcast, they sort of happened in the background during this job. Without getting into the gritty detail. The school had been taken over by a multi academy trust, making it a really bad place to be. Emily Slade: So it was a case of oh, well not only do I have another option, but this option isn't as nice anymore.
Liam Taylor: Yeah, so even though it was only 20 something hours a week, I found that I spent all of my free time dreading having to go to work the next day.
Emily Slade: If that hadn't happened, do you think you would have tried to juggle the two? To have that safety net?
Liam Taylor: long term plan there my initially only intended to stay there five years I want to see an entire cohort of kids start in year seven and yet leave with me as I leave in year 11 with pretty good music GCSE is that that was my goal going in. So then, having achieved that five years and what literally felt like a blink, it just sort of disappeared, and then sort of staying there for another three years. My goal was to try to gradually reduce my hours there and gradually increase freelance hours. At the time, the goal was to do that with music composition work, maybe a little bit of videography, so sort of the stuff that I made pod creative for so maybe some more podcasting stuff Have some more sort of bespoke media. But I was thinking more. I wasn't thinking so much about being a digital marketer, more of like, I suppose, I suppose I was I just didn't really put that label on it. Yeah, so I'd had a few jobs making, like YouTube adverts for companies. But that was just the standalone advert, there was no strategy behind it, which I suppose is what makes you a digital marketer is having like the overall plan. And like a document, you can refer back to, we're going to make this kind of Tiktok because the document says, so just making standalone YouTube videos for companies I did quite a bit. So I was hoping to kind of increase that and hoping to increase kind of film scoring work as well as I was doing. And then yeah, just gradually reduce the school hours and increase those freelance hours. But it just kind of got to a point. I mean, lockdown was a factor as well. One of the things that I was doing, because we couldn't be on on site. So what I was doing quite often was the music teacher would say, Hey, I'm teaching this thing to this group next year. Could you make me a video version of this? Or could you play piano play guitar to demonstrate the thing I'm talking about? Yes, absolutely, I can do that. So then I got quite good at making not the highest quality video, it just had to be like, really quick to turn over really easy to edit, but still kind of engaging to watch which not dissimilar to how Instagram reels works, or how Tik Tok works now, so I got quite good at churning content out and having to do it in batches, sort of sit there record for three hours, and then spend the rest of a fortnight editing through that. That was kind of a helpful thing, that period of lockdown to go, I can actually really, like go through content for this very specific thing. So there's no reason I couldn't also do that for a client, for example.
Emily Slade: Did you make a mistake? Not going to university, do you think?
Liam Taylor: No, I would very much like to go to university at some point. The problem would have been going straight from sixth form where I was studying Classics and Philosophy, and then going from that into university, presumably still studying Classics or Philosophy. In my late teens, not knowing I was dyslexic?
Emily Slade: Ooh, not the only one I imagine.
Liam Taylor: Essay based subject for the Dyslexic kid who doesn't know why he can't read as fast as the other kids. That's the main reason that would have been a problem at the time, university would have been a terrible idea. For me, it's quite easy to sit here in retrospect and go, Oh, I made a great decision. 10 years ago, it was mostly twofold. Firstly, I don't really know what I want to do with my life, I want to, that's why I want to go into the world of work, see what's actually out there. Because I've spent seven years in education. I don't know what the world is actually, like, I want to go encounter people, learn about the world, learn about myself, and then make an informed decision about what I want to do. The second kind of reason there was I was reticent to do two extra years of sick form. I was reticent to go five years of school two years of sick form. I'm not then going to do another three years of learning. And I was only working in retail for a couple of years before I decided to go to access to music. I didn't expect that the result would be oh, there are much better guitarist in the world. What if I got good at Twitter? So to answer your question, at the time, no, I was again very belligerently trying to do things my own way. Didn't really want to stay in education. And looking back on it, that was the right choice. And now I know I'm dyslexic. I know how to work around that. But I didn't know that. Yeah, so absolutely. The right decision for me. At the time, I think I would like to go back to your university. There's some really interesting, higher education courses, especially at the Masters level. And I think at some point, I'm gonna see if I can sneak my way in and do a Masters course without doing the BA because it's just for pure...
Emily Slade: Time efficiency, I guess?
Liam Taylor: Yeah, I spent ages learning music and marketing through doing I don't feel like I need to do the BA to understand the content of this Masters course. Emily Slade: Would you focus on music, for your Masters? Or focus more around digital marketing to sort of expand your skill set?
Liam Taylor: Maybe. I sort of at the moment feel like I'm doing okay with what I know. I think if I reach a point where I realise okay, actually I do have this this gaping hole in my in my knowledge. I need to fix that in some way. And if it's not something I can fix with, I don't know a course or a skillshare or something, if it needs to be bigger than yeah, okay, Masters is probably the way to go. And that's a good way to invest in myself. Music might be really fun, or some sort of arts course I think would be really fun. Yeah, not sure. loads of options, we'll see. We'll see you when I have the money and the time.
Emily Slade: So speaking of money, talk to me about tax returns how, as a self employed person, you obviously have money coming through the door, but no one to sort of deal with it, and you've got to pay your taxes, and you've got to not go to prison? How do you do that?
Liam Taylor: That's the two things I live by earning some money, and not going to prison. Yes. So it is daunting. At first, I sort of got to grips with tax returns through having the Odd Creative, which is just how you know that that was early doors, how it was making money whilst also having a job, and today with the Conversation Hat Patreon. Freelance accounting is a lot easier than a company's accounting, because implicitly with a company, you hire an accountant, or you have a specific person in your organisation that does the books. So I kind of had to learn the hard way through doing that. And now I'm like, okay, actually doing as self assessment is a lot easier. The things to learn are, just know that when HMRC send you a letter, you probably have to do something. They're not just sending you a letter for fun, that they're quite efficient in that sense, like, they're not going to waste paper on you unless you need to take action, read the letter. That's, that's a mistake that I made. I now use a website called FreshBooks. What's great about FreshBooks is there's a desktop version, there's a mobile version. So if say, I'm, I don't know, I'm going to an expo for a client, I can take a screenshot of my train ticket, upload that to FreshBooks, and FreshBooks knows this is a rail ticket, which client do you want to assign this to. So then when it comes to invoice time it goes, they owe this much for the hours that you work, they also owe you for this train journey, and this lunch. So that's really handy. And it also will do reporting for you. So you can, for example, hook it up with your bank accounts. So it'll see everything you do. And then you just labor, you can just like do a tick box. This is household stuff is household stuff, this is rent. And then this is an expense for this client, that's an expense for this client. And it will do a report for you all like, you know what, it's various expenses as well that are maybe not specific to clients, but you need to do your job, like SD cards for my camera, for example, I'm gonna need a lot of those. But it's not for any one client. So that's an expense. And then FreshBooks will do a report for you. And it very nearly resembles the information that HMRC wants from you. I'm not an accountant,
Emily Slade: But you haven't been to prison yet.
Liam Tayler: I did get one fine. I didn't read the letter when they sent it. Always read the letter. No, I know. And that was because I thought that when you submit the the accounts, the annual accounts for a company to HMRC, it automatically goes to the other thing that I can't remember. It does not unless you tick a box. Okay, you got to tick that box. So when they sent me a letter saying we haven't heard from you're like, ha, yeah, you have. So it is very scary. But I suppose the good news is, I clearly don't know what I'm doing. But I'm not in prison.
Emily Slade: Yeah, and you've only made that mistake.
Liam Tayler: I've made one mistake, had to pay one fine and haven't been to prison. I must stress it's a lot easier as a self employed person than trying to run a company and do company accounts. There's there's many fewer ways to mess it up. So yeah, filing the self assessment tax returns is really scary at first, but actually if you have something like FreshBooks and there are alternatives out there, of course FreshBooks just happens to be The one that that I liked the look of the most really does simplify it. So it is scary, but you're just gonna have to do it, because otherwise you'd go to prison. But definitely work out your, your threshold. So for the first, I think year and a half that I was doing the freelance practice, I wasn't earning enough money to pay tax. So I voluntarily paid National Insurance for that year, because it's the right thing to do. And it was literally a couple quid. And then yes, so when you first start out, you're probably not going to make enough money for it to be anyone's problem. If you're, if you've got contracted work, and you're doing freelance, it's definitely worth doing because the combination of those two wages might just tip you over that threshold, but learn what your threshold is. And get in the habit of having an Excel sheet that adds up what you're doing, if you don't want to pay for FreshBooks, although Fresh Books is tax deductible. So that's good. Hot Tip, everything is tax deductible. Pretty much. And the handy thing for me is that I will quite often write music for the content that I'm making for clients. So I kind of Yeah, I do need guitar strings in order to do this part of what I'm doing. So that's quite handy. So learn about what is and what is not tax deductible, learn what your threshold is, and just get used to keeping a sheet tally of what what is coming in what's going out. Yeah, and you'll be fine. It is daunting, but you will be fine.
Emily Slade: What didn't you think about when you started
Liam Taylor: Firing clients.
Emily Slade: And is that something you've had to do?
Liam Taylor: Yes. Firing clients is such a weird thing. But it feels really good. It has a lot to do with what their expectations of you are, and what they say their expectations of you are. So by and large, if you you've just got to foster a scenario where you can just be really upfront about what you're expecting, what of their expectations you think you might not be able to fulfill? Are there alternatives you can offer. And it is basically I've only ever had to like say goodbye to clients, because they weren't forthright about their expectations. I also tried to now I tried to make it really clear that like, if I have a problem, I'm just going to tell you, and we're going to find a way to work through it. Because I wouldn't have taken you on board if I didn't kind of want to do this work. So I want to find ways to make it work. So if I, if I am blunt about a problem having it's because I want to do this, and I want to make it work is just that your suggestion might be ridiculous. Yes. So being upfront about your expectations. I don't know if there is a way to work out if a client is disingenuous about their expectations. But I definitely didn't expect to have to tell people that that we're not going to work together. This was like this will be my last month. I've done this. This is an providing. Here's an SD card with all the stuff going. It's yeah, it felt really weird the first couple times now I kind of like it because it's a case of power. Yeah, it is. Yeah, no, it really is. But it's also like, look, we tried it out. It could be that what you're trying to do just doesn't match up with the approach you want to take. And you're not willing to look past that. But maybe if I say, look, here are the problems, I'm out that might help you realise, oh, actually, we need another approach. Most of the time, those clients are still doing what they were planning, and they're not growing weird.
Emily Slade: But that's good that you've clearly gotten to a point where there's not a panic to sort of cling on to every client that you've gone through, you do have the freedom and the space to make business decisions that not only help your company, but also help you as a person if it's frustrating working with these clients, or if it's, you know, not conducive to anyone's that sort of thing.
Liam Taylor: Exactly. And I think one of those was a decision where, like I said earlier, I get physically uncomfortable if I'm not making stuff, whether that's I need to I need an outlet to make music. I need an outlet to be weird on the internet. That's the Conversation Hat, and most of my other creative issues are sort of scratched through client work. I got to a point where I'd kind of overbooked myself ever so slightly. And I was prepared for that because I was going to outsource some of the like the copywriting some of like the really sort of office-ey type jobs to someone else. And they the client, in theory, were fine with that. But they actually weren't so I ended up having to do all of the work not outsourcing any of it and I didn't have any time to do any of the stuff that I need to do so then it was just a case of, Okay, which of my current clients are either not giving me that much money are kind of annoying to work with, you know, I could sort of bounce out and get rid of the one that wasn't helpful, or who was the odd one out, who wasn't...
Emily Slade: Gelling?
Liam Taylor: Yeah, gelling is exactly the right word. And it wasn't necessarily that they've done anything wrong, it was just at this moment, I need more time, otherwise, I will explode. So sorry, bye. And that was a bit that was kind of a win as well to be like, Okay, I'm actually kind of in demand now. So it's quite a good position to be in. And it isn't just that, here's a tip, if you aren't going to fire a client, don't just leave, give them options. And this is something I learned. Being in bands back in the day and learning about band management. If you're in a band, if you can't make a gig, or you need to quit, you need to give them like a little list of people to rely on, this guy's a great player, but he smells, this guy is not a very good player, but he's nice to be around. This guy has a lot of disposable income, you know, pros and cons of each of these people, and you can go away and make a decision. And by and large, they probably won't use your suggestions. But you have to give that so you're not just abandoning them disappearing and leaving them high and dry. You know, give them an opportunity to do what it is they want to do. But just not being a part of that. So yeah, always try to give them someone or, or if it is, their approach is wrong. Say I wholeheartedly believe that. You're making a mistake in your approach. Here's what I would suggest. And usually, that's just me reprinting out the strategy document I do, like my first week with them, just like, if you read the thing I made. That is my suggestion. I'm just gonna highlight bits of it. Passive aggressively. Underline things. That's what you should be doing by.
Emily Slade: Excellent. So you obviously didn't go to university we've already talked about that you might do in the future. But in the meantime, you have done quite a few short courses. Would you like to talk about those?
Liam Taylor: Absolutely. So yeah, when I when I was starting out, October of 2021, can't remember what I said. Yeah, really eager to sort of formalise what I was, what I'd been doing all this time online, learn those acronyms, all sorts of things. Coursera was a really good website, it's a bit like Skillshare. It's the word course with RA. On the end, you can audits quite a lot of their courses and only pay if you want the certificate she really had, you can also make your own certificates quite easily just saying. I found that was really good, not just to learn stuff, but also to learn that there's lots of different approaches. Sometimes, if you go to university, you feel like you're learning the way that things are, rather than one specific approach. So what are those courses and being able to audit them meant that I could sort of see, well, here's lots of different approaches do I want to do one of these do I want to pick and choose am I going to find a problem if I take half of this course, half of this course. And then I ended up paying for a certificate in the one that I sort of aligned with the most. Google have some quite good digital marketing courses, because Google want you to use Google and Google want you to be good at making your websites so that they work on Google. So Google will tell you what to do. And this is also true of Instagram, Tiktok, Facebook, all of them, they will tell you how they work. They will offer you quite a lot of free certificates, if you learn how to use their platform properly. So if you are into really into Instagram, for example, they have resources that you can learn how to be really good at Instagram. I also did a graphic design course, in Cambridge, sick form Hills Road. It was like an eight week course and I sort of did it because I found that making social media posts. I used just kind of putting stuff on Canva and not really like the headlines there and there's a person's face. What do you want? So that was kind of good to learn a bit about the theory of graphic design and kind of get to grips with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop programs like that, that I still use. So yeah, that graphic design course was great. And I ended up designing a bunch of merch for the conversation hat as well. And yeah, just learning the basic. It's a bit like music. If you learn what the basic rules are, then you know how many rules you can get away with breaking and you think well I can break it in this way. It has this effect as long as I don't do this other thing will be fine. So graphic design. I don't I'm not a graphic designer, but I definitely use images and video to try and communicate ideas. So that was a great way to sort of formalise that as well. Yeah. Big fan of big fan of short courses. Yeah.
Emily Slade: Perfect. That's fantastic. Thank you so much for your time today.
Liam Taylor: Thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate it.
Emily Slade: Thanks again to Liam for his time, if you do want to find out more about what he does, or listen to his podcast, you can click all the links in the description. Make sure you give us a follow wherever you get your podcasts, and if you’re enjoying Future You make sure to leave us a review. If you want to learn more about freelancing, head to Prospects.ac.uk. If you want to get in touch, you can email us at podcast@prospects.ac.uk or find us on Instagram and TikTok, all the links are in the description. Thanks very much for listening and we'll see you next time.
Notes on transcript
This transcript was produced using a combination of automated software and human transcribers and may contain errors. The audio version is definitive and should be checked before quoting.
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