Over the years I’ve been asked many times how I make money. The answer is a bit diverse, but ultimately, I’ve always walked into any hobby or project with the mindset that it needs to pay for itself. In this post, I’ll explain how to use your skills to make a living, plus discuss the very important knowledge of how to accurately price your products or your skills.

For more information on the free course Melissa and I are discussing in the podcast above, visit 3 Days to Sales: How to Effectively Sell Your Product On Social Media.

Gaining Freedom

I think it’s safe to say we could ALL use a little more FREEDOM in our lives, wouldn’t you agree? Some of us want more free TIME, some of us want FINANCIAL freedom, some of us want freedom from our emotional and physical BURDENS. Those last two are definitely a lot harder, but even the first two seem pretty impossible amidst the chaos of our daily lives.

When I started my business, I wanted my time to be my own, not so I could lay on a beach, but so I could justify spending my time working on things that aligned with my personal goals and values rather than punching a time clock and commuting far away from my farm and family.

Building a business while also working full time and starting a homestead from scratch didn’t make for a whole lot of free time, especially for the first few years.

And, during the time I’ve been self-employed, Adam and I have found ourselves at different stages between financial ruin and financial freedom. I am a risk-taker, and act on faith more often than not, which has made for some very… interesting seasons. But two years ago, things really started to turn around, and those risks and all that time really started to pay off.

Becoming Self-Employed

The people who say “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” are full of crap. No matter how much you love what you do, there are always going to be aspects of work that will be just that: work. I always warn people wanting to quit their job and stop punching a clock for some jerk, that they’re about to trade in 40 hour work weeks, health benefits, sick days, vacation time, and a predictable paycheck to work 80 hours a week with no benefits or work-life balance for an even bigger jerk, themselves.

Finding the Work/Life Balance

Learning how to balance my work and my life being self-employed has been one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced. When I quit my tech job to become a failed furniture maker, I thought that would get me out from behind a computer screen and mean I could just play in the Woodshop building cool stuff. What ended up happening was I was spending 40+ hours a week doing administrative work to get my business off the ground, regularly pulling all-nighters in the shop, and still missing client deadlines, all to make about $3 an hour. Needless to say, it also took me way too long to realize that that business in that state was a zero sum game and that I should quit, but I was too busy trying to make a broken model work to notice little things like an ever-draining bank account and total creative and emotional burnout simmering on the back burner until it was way too late.

One funny side effect of sharing my journey on social media while I was in the midst of building a farm, a business, and a life from the ground up was that I started to get tons of questions from folks wanting to do the same. Questions like: “how I was managing my time and doing SO MUCH,” “how I was building an online following using social media,” and “how my business was generating the income I needed to support my farm, to hire my friends to support their families and to build a craft school to support our community.”

While I was fairly comfortable teaching the woodworking, gardening, and homesteading topics I’ve spent the last 8 years of my life pursuing, I wasn’t NEARLY as comfortable at the start speaking to business-related questions, because being a serial entrepreneur since I was six, I’ve only gotten REALLY good at one thing in business: Failing.

Capitalizing on “Failure”

But as I started talking to other entrepreneurs, I realized something pretty huge. Failing, when done right, is not failure, it’s a learning opportunity. Though all of us want to come out of the gate with a stellar product and launch a successful business, the likelihood of that happening is fairly slim. BUT, if we can learn to love trying things, testing imperfect offerings early in the process rather than waiting until we’ve got a “perfect” product if we can be evaluating what works, what doesn’t, and then trying to make our next attempt a little better, we are ultimately able to iteratively create MUCH better products/services MUCH more affordably and MUCH more quickly. And guess what? The results of that iterative process are MUCH more likely to serve our customers’ real needs and ultimately, build a stronger business too. The problem was not in the “failures,” it was in their labeling. If lessons are learned and methods are improved when failures occur, they aren’t failures at all.

It takes most entrepreneurs 7 businesses to come up with something that works- that usually takes decades, and their eventual success is because of a whole bunch of collected learnings from previous businesses. Few of us have the luxury of spending decades learning, we need to feed our families right now.

Test, Test, & Test Some More

But if you’re anything like me, you probably don’t love the idea of putting anything that isn’t fully “ready” out into the world, because what we DO feels like a reflection of who we ARE, and we don’t love the idea of putting a less than perfect version of ourselves out on display.

If you’re like me, you probably struggle knowing where to start.

You probably have tons of ideas, but a super busy life, so you feel a ton of pressure to pick the RIGHT idea and focus on it.

If you’re like me, you REALLY struggle valuing your own time and pricing/selling your products so you get fairly compensated.

If you’re like me, you might also really struggle with technology, and the thought of building a website or posting on social media makes you feel super old. Trust me. I GET IT. Five years in and I still have to get help adding a digital signature to a PDF.

I had to publish 1000 posts on Instagram before I felt comfortable in front of the camera and was able to write a post caption and press “post” without having an existential crisis in the process. I can’t even go back and look at my first IG posts or watch my first 30 Youtube videos because they are soooooo cringe-worthy to me. I learned so much in the process of making them. I gained so much confidence in the process of posting them. I paid attention to what people said and how they interacted with the content I created and tried to make every new post 1% better than the last thing I put out there. How to take a good photo, how to say things clearly and concisely, using storytelling techniques, the editing tricks, the understanding of what I do and don’t need to capture while shooting, all that learning was in the doing. If I’d waited UNTIL I could make the perfect Instagram post or a YouTube video I was ACTUALLY ready to publish, I’d still be waiting.

I still haven’t fully rid myself of the knots that accumulate in my stomach every time my finger hovers over the “publish” button, and I’m still not fully immune to the harsh words and criticism I often receive, but hearing from folks about how the things I’ve shared online has impacted their lives for the better, having had the opportunity to make a career out of sharing the knowledge and skills I’ve been acquiring with others who need them… that makes it all worth it. And for those of you afraid of the bad— The good, encouraging, kind, constructive feedback has outnumbered the bad 1000 to 1.

Learning to Pivot

When it came to selling things, the process and the emotional knots that accompanied it was no different for me. I tried, paid attention to feedback, and tried to do a little better the next time. When the pandemic hit last year and stalled the building of the school I’ve been building, when the web developer my business partner Josh and I were working with to create our online education platform flaked out on us, and when we desperately needed money to keep the business afloat amidst it all, if we’d waited until we had the perfect version of what we knew was possible, we’d have gone bankrupt in the process.

I had the first opportunity to teach about growing a craft-centered community using social media as the keynote speaker for a woodworking event. That morphed into another teaching on growing a business using social media at another event, and then yet another on creating multiple passive revenue streams, and that one packed out the room during multiple sessions, which made me realize there was a serious gap in quality business mentorship within the craft and homesteading community.

So much of what I’d been practicing through repetition and micro-adjustments for years in my own business, knowledge gained “in the doing” had become intuitive, natural, automatic, but as I started to watch myself working, I realized (well, actually, let’s be honest, Josh helped me realize) that even though I don’t know EVERYTHING, I had a ton of helpful, practical information to offer folks trying to get their own businesses off the ground.

A Business Opportunity

So we tested the waters by offering a webinar on growing a business using social media. While I’d have loved to come out of the gate with a full course, we needed money THAT weekend, the course materials were already gathered from teaching that class elsewhere, and, while we didn’t have the website to host it, I knew we could send folks a private link to view the webinar on YouTube. 300 people signed up for that first class. So I offered another one and another one after that. Josh and I worked on developing the curriculum for a cohort-based business building course focused on providing 1-on-1 mentorship and took 16 people through it in June.

This is what a few folks within the cohort had to say about the month we spent working together:

Anne and Josh taught me more about how to effectively run my own business in one month than I learned from my four-year entrepreneurship degree. The mindset and strategy work paired with practical tutorials one-on-one feedback helped me make some major breakthroughs in how I run my business. You are by far the best investment I've ever made in my business. - Breanne Hedges, Hedge Valley Farms
Anne and Josh’s small business incubator course was instrumental in helping me shed some serious threats to my business that would have hamstrung me for years. By inviting me to do some hard work, philosophical work, values clarification work, and not just handing me a checklist, the SOAT biz class enlivened me to really ask more granular questions about who I am and what I really want to do. The community also has been a nice sounding board. Thank you! - Amy Price-Neff Mind Stream Integrative Health
Anne and Josh were extremely helpful in coaching me through my small business, and I cannot recommend their course enough! If you have struggled through social media marketing, everyday practical systems for your business, working with sponsors, or even time management, then this is the course for you. Anne and Josh are personable people who have worked through so many small business issues, and they will help you wherever you are in the process. This course is an investment in not only your business, but also your life. Sign up today! - Blair Chadwick - Chadwick Hardwood Flooring

A FREE Opportunity for YOU!

A few months ago, I started talking to my friend Melissa K Norris, someone I’d watched and admired from afar for months, about trading mentorship in our own areas of “expertise-“ hers being launching online courses and nurturing an email community, and mine being business foundations, building a brand, and utilizing social media. During one of our chats, I asked if she’d be interested in teaching a cohort-based course together, and our 8-week Six-Figure Homestead mentorship course was born.

Both of us being so results-focused though, we wanted to offer a free 3-day training on the front end of the course for folks to get some time-bound results of their own whether they were ready to jump in and take the full course or not. That 3-day challenge starts tomorrow, and we’ve already got more than 1200 people ready to join us. If you are ready to start a new business or grow an existing business that will provide you the financial and time freedom you crave, please join us in 3 Days to Sales: How to Effectively Sell Your Product On Social Media!

Using Your Skillset to Build a Business