Working Out Dani Thompson: Recent Episodes
Ashley Baxter & Paddy Donnelly
Join Ashley Baxter and Paddy Donnelly on a journey to figure out how to create a business doing what you love. Is it possible to make a living from your hobby? On Working out, Ashley & Paddy discuss their own personal journeys in creating their passion-based business. This is about the expedition, the here and now, the daily challenges and achievements towards getting paid for your passion.
Season two is here! After taking a break from the show over the winter, Paddy and Ashley are back. Paddy's got some stories after travelling for 3 months around South America. He explains how he was able to take so much time off work and how he's not quite yet ready to settle back into client work. Ashley talks about her new work/life balance and the pair reveal their plans for the upcoming year, both in terms of the podcast and their own businesses. It's good to be back!
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We've made it! In the season 1 finale of our show we look back at how the podcast has changed our working lives over the past 34 weeks. We talk about what we've learned, how our goals have changed since the beginning and what you can expect from season 2!
Staying in your comfort zone and not taking any chances can be tempting, but will it make you happy in the long run? Setting up your own business doing what you love takes a lot of courage, so this week we talk about the fears we've encountered in our own personal journeys and share some tips on how to conquer yours.
A good designer obsesses over the details. Last week we talked about Ashley's wedding photography process, so this week we discuss the details of Paddy's illustration and design process. Learn how he gets new clients, deals with payment, budgets and contracts, working remotely with clients and developers, the software he uses and the final (very tidy) deliverables.
Ashley reveals the secrets of being a wedding photographer. She covers finding new clients, first impressions, scouting venues, getting paid, crazy requests, conducting yourself on the big day, post-event communication and delivering the finished product. If you're thinking of entering the photography scene then this one is for you, however we can all learn something from listening to other peoples' processes.
In order to have a healthy working relationship between client and designer/photographer/other, you need to educate the client on how to work effectively with you. Before anything starts, you both need to decide what each of your roles will be, discuss each of your goals for the project and establish the best day to day working practices. This week we talk about how Paddy and Ashley educate their clients and how better communication leads to better finished products.
The freelance life can be a lonely one, especially if you work from home. Co-working spaces, having side projects and contributing to your industry all feature on our list of tips to avoid 'freelancer loneliness'.
If you want to run your own business, you’re eventually going to have to market it to people. This week we talk about one method of doing that - public speaking. From intimate meet ups to large conferences, we cover preparation, dealing with nerves and the urge to check all your tweets as soon as you come off stage.
We've finished our MVP! After working on the side project for the past few weeks and documenting our progress along the way, we're finally happy to announce our little app is ready for you to play with. Yay!
We'd like you to meet Toddle, an app to help you take baby steps towards your goals. In this final part of our mini-series we talk about what we've both learned from this experience. We hope you like it!
What happens when you miss a deadline? Have you planned for it? We're a little behind schedule with our app, and in this episode we explain why. Ashley talks about the challenges she's been facing while re-kickstarting her development skills, her struggles with 'levelling-up' and she eventually sends a flare up for help. If you'd like to be one of our beta testers, then shoot us an email on czrnik13@peerh.com.
In the third part of our mini-series, we look at the progress Ashley has been making with the development of the app. She presents what she's whipped up so far and we see if it works or not, which leads us on to a discussion about having confidence in your code and working to deadlines. We're now looking for beta testers for the app, so email us on czrnik13@peerh.com if you're interested in taking it for a spin.
Paddy pitches the wireframes and designs to Ashley in part 2 of our mini series following our side project creation process. We discuss the contract between us, the interactions and details of our daily stand up app and what the next steps will be to create our MVP. If you want an insight into Paddy's design process and how he presents to clients, this one is for you. Make sure and visit http://workingoutpodcast.com to view the wireframes and designs and follow along as Paddy & Ashley discuss them.
We're putting our money where our mouth is this week as we kick off a multi-part series where we're actually going to design, build and ship a side project together. In this first part, we brainstorm a list of ideas and make a decision on an MVP that would tie in well with the philosophy of the show. This series sees us putting into practice all of the topics and advice we've been discussing over the past 22 weeks of the show.
Everything you put out there contributes in some way to how people think of you as a professional. Every tweet, Facebook status, Instagram and email. Everything. People like to deal with people, so ask yourself why would a potential client choose you over someone else with your exact skills? Honing your skills is important of course, but what makes the difference is that extra value you can add that nobody else can.
Why would anyone like my work? Why would anyone read my blog? Why would anyone listen to my podcast? We know we've got the skills to deliver, but why do we still have confidence issues when it comes to our passion? If we should be confident in one thing, it's our passion. So why do we still think we're not good enough? Why do we constantly compare ourselves to others? Ashley and Paddy discuss their experiences with these questions, and touch on the difference between low self-confidence and being too self-critical.
Have you grown bored of your goals or projects? Starting something is easy, but sticking with it is the difficult part. Paddy and Ashley talk about the key to sticking with things and the importance of optimising your environment, as well as becoming a proactive worker instead of a reactive worker. It's easy to give into disruption and stop sticking to something.
Nobody said following your passion would be easy. Encountering periods of frustration is normal. Ashley and Paddy share some of the frustrations they face in building their passion-based businesses, from coping with a lack of support to dealing with a lack of control in projects. A lot of people love complaining about their frustrations, but taking action on those frustrations is critical.
In a culture that celebrates long, unsustainable working hours, Paddy and Ashley look at how taking a break from work can actually be conducive to productivity. They talk about the guilt they've battled with when taking breaks from work and stepping away from their computers. Whether it's exercise or playing video games, though, taking time out allows you to recharge your batteries, ultimately putting you in a better place to accomplish your goals in building your passion-based business.
It's that age old saying that you should 'never work for friends or family', but is it ever a good idea? What happens when professional criticism comes across as a personal attack? How much should you be charging your family for your 'passion'? This week Ashley and Paddy chat about the good and bad experiences they've had with this particularly tricky topic. They talk about how early preparation can help establish a better working relationship and the big difference between working 'with' someone and working 'for' someone.
Do you know 'what' you're passionate about? Sometimes it's not so easy to pick out a theme that ties all your various passions together. What if you aren't passionate about anything at all? Following up on last week's 'why' discussion, Ashley and Paddy discuss how flexibility is key when setting up a business doing what you love.
Using the 5 Whys technique, an initially skeptical Paddy finds out that his original goal of 'cutting out client work' isn't really his goal at all. This week on the show, Ashley and Paddy embark on a journey of self-discovery to get to the root of why they're doing what they're doing.
We all go to conferences or listen to podcasts and nod along to the advice thinking 'That's a great idea, I must do that.' But then we don't do anything about it. We slump straight back into our familiar surroundings, when we should be taking action! This week we discuss why we don't follow through with things and how to optimise your environment to get better at doing it.
The Day Job. It's one of the huge barriers between you and setting up your dream business. Not a decision to be taken lightly, but leaving the 'security' of a day job for a chance at setting up a passion based business is a big step in the process. This week, Paddy talks about his experience quitting his job and setting up as a freelancer, and if you're thinking about making the leap yourself then we have some advice on how to go about it. No job has 100% security, so you might as well be in one that you love, rather than one you hate.
We've all had it. That feeling where you can't move forward, the idea well has run dry and everything that you create is missing the mark. Creative block is horrible, but is it really just an excuse we use for something we actually don't want to do? This week we talk about our tangles with creative block, both in client projects and our own personal endeavours, and share our tips for getting through it.
Whether it's hearing the words 'we won't be publishing your book' or 'I don't like green', everyone eventually deals with rejection in their quest to create a passion based business. Stop letting other people dictate the success of your dream. There isn’t any shame in being rejected, but there is shame in not doing anything about it and letting it hold you back from achieving your goals.
Registering domain names and putting up landing pages are easy. Actually building and shipping your idea is the hard part. We talk about those first few crucial days after you get an idea, and how building something as quickly as possible can drastically affect your motivation. If you've simply lost the passion for the thing you want to ship, should you just cut your losses? This week we ask the question 'Why are you not shipping?'.
Do your passions lie in an industry which lacks innovation? Do you feel you could do better but there are too many huge, more established players to compete with? Remember, more often than not, true innovation comes from the little guy. Ashley talks us through her experience of building a new quote system that she wanted to create in order to disrupt the insurance industry, but after presenting this to the insurance companies things didn't go quite as planned.
‘If you're good at something, never do it for free’. How do you charge for doing what you love? It’s difficult to put a price on a hobby that you're turning into a profession. This week we talk about knowing your value, negotiating with clients and taking control of your pricing.
How can you snag those dream clients? This week we talk about portfolios, which pieces you should and should not put in them and the damaging effects of a coming soon page. We discuss the importance of clearly defining your potential clients and curating your personal brand. If there's a certain type of work you want to be doing, then you should already be doing it.
How do you actually go about flipping a passion into a money making venture that you can live off? We discuss the various steps you should take as your turn a hobby into a job. Any niche passion can make money, so why not yours?
Why are we being encouraged to fail all the time? 'Fail early, fail often'. 'Fail, fail, fail'. Failure is a big deal, so why are we trivialising it? Why are we being bombarded with the negative side of failure, rather than focusing on the positives? There are valuable lessons to be learned from failure, but we need to stop celebrating it.
How does success seemingly come so easily to others, when I have to work so hard for it? When you look at talented, successful people, you're only seeing the finished product, not all the hard work they put in. Talent gets your foot in the door, it's the hard work that makes up the other 99.9%. On the show we chat about confidence in your own work, and how a lack of it can sometimes lead to you feeling like an impostor.
Ashley gets angry at herself in this episode on collaboration. We try to define what exactly counts as collaborating and Ashley talks about her frustrations of working solo on projects. How do you make yourself available for collaboration and how do you brand your role within a team? We also touch on ownership of a project and the advantages of working solo vs collaborating.
Don't have enough hours in the day? In this episode Ashley and Paddy discuss how badly they manage their time. Taking on too much work, saying yes to everything and switching off are all on the agenda this week. If you find yourself swamped with work and unable to say no, this one is for you.
In this first episode, Ashley and Paddy introduce the Working Out podcast and what it's about, touching upon where they're both currently at in their careers, and where they ultimately want to be.