I signed up for the taplio one month trial. One of the features is to be able to find trending posts in your content areas, and I thought that could be interesting. But it doesn’t work at all for my content areas – sometimes it literally comes up empty!

I didn’t think the webinar was a waste of time, though. I found some of the frameworks she uses for organizing her content schedule useful.

I’m definitely re-upping again!

Hi Karen, I do evaluation/research and last year the central focus I was working on for my business I was calling data auditing – but maybe it is similar to what you are describing? I would basically go through an organization’s data (I primarily work in the criminal justice sector so would be a county probation office, or the statewide public defense office), compile a comprehensive report on the quality of each of their data systems, the descriptives I could pull, and assess how they could best use their data as it was currently. Then I would work with them on their goals to figure out what tweaks they could do to get more use from it.

I’ve done this with a few organizations and ended up back-burnering this project because in that sector, if the folks in charge doesn’t already have a strong desire to elevate their data (and an understanding of how it could serve them) it was too big of a leap for the price I would need to charge.

Is that similar to what you described with strategic planning?

Hi Joe! I recently told a client something to the effect of: “I asked for this meeting because I was doing some planning for the next quarter and I realized I had to make some hard decisions about what I can and can’t continue doing. I won’t be able to continue working with you. It’s important to me to leave the project in a place that will make it easy for someone else to pick up so I’ll be figuring out how to wrap things up in the next couple of weeks, but I wanted to go ahead and let you know so you can plan start to plan accordingly.” I told them in a zoom meeting – while I don’t see myself working with this client in the future, I am definitely in a position where I need to preserve relationships and people’s opinion of me whenever possible!

This was a client very similar to the situation described in Stephanie’s last email and I so badly wanted to make it work, but the reality is there aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything.  There are still loose ends to tie up but I felt good about the way I handled it. I was prepared for them to ask what they could do to keep me on but really I don’t see the overall situation getting more functional so I was glad they accepted this decision!

Congrats Lauren! I love it when things random connect like that – it always makes me feel like I am on the right path in life in a cosmic way.

I’m definitely re-upping. I had a major life change last year – I had a new baby in July – so I always knew my progress would be slow. I just hired a lawyer to help me set up my LLC and some contract templates and I’m meeting with an accountant next week. It feels good to be making moves. I’m a little anxious seeing this money go out the door but I’m focusing on how good it feels to be betting on myself!

Just throwing in my relevant thoughts here. I’ve had a couple of experiences recently that have made substantial increases to my prices, following the method from the pricing module, seem more reasonable. The biggest was when I found out a competitor whose work is really sloppy charges more than 4 times as much as me! I am really starting to see that my reputation would actually improve if I charge more. I like the idea of discounts for the nonprofits I really value working with.