Hello and welcome to Resilient Entrepreneurs podcast. Are you stuck in a place where you'd love to scale your business, but that would mean hiring staff and that feels overwhelming or too much work or too expensive or what if I can't find the right people? If you've ever thought that, you will love our conversation today. Elizabeth Ice is the founder and CEO of Results Resourcing, online talent curation. And we are going to pick her brain gently and ask her to share her opinions on the future of work, fractional staffing trends, the wonderful world of virtual assistants. There's probably going to be a chat. There most definitely will be a chat about AI in there.
This is pretty exciting. Elizabeth has stacks of corporate and entrepreneurial experience. She's led multi-billion dollar enterprises, as well as startup ventures in technology and staffing through mergers, tech chang,e the lot. We can all learn a lot from Elizabeth today. We're your co-hosts, Vicki and Laura from Two Four One. We're here to support business founders just like you to launch a new business or a new part of your business and it's an exciting time and it's one that requires a lot of support. It's our intention for this podcast to be a valuable resource for you on your journey. Elizabeth, welcome to Resilient Entrepreneurs and thank you for joining us.
Thank you. I'm delighted to be here today.
Yeah, we're so excited for this conversation. I think it's right up Vicki and I's alley for sure. And the first phrase I want to start is I noticed on your LinkedIn profile, it says serial entrepreneur. So that immediately gets me excited because anyone who's a serial entrepreneur knows entrepreneurship, loves entrepreneurship because you kind of have to. But it's great to start at the beginning of your story. So I'm curious, were you a bit of an entrepreneurial kid when you were growing up?
Absolutely not. Interestingly enough, and I've kind of reverse engineered this over the years, but I grew up in a family, an extended family of educators. And my dad was a history teacher. Then he became a principal of a school, then a superintendent of schools in a couple of different states. And then ultimately he was a tenured university professor teaching educational administration here in the United States. In retrospect, while everyone was in teaching, I think he was entrepreneurial and that would be my route. And I say that because most teachers I know stay in one place, they wait for that next opportunity to open up. Obviously, my dad didn't. And we moved about every three to four years, which ended up bringing up three kids that were very resilient and very resourceful and could adapt to change, in fact, enjoy it. And so while I don't have that, I actually had no business role models. I was the first kid to go into business, because I didn't want to be a teacher and I didn't want to do more school. So I joined Corporate America, and I think I was an intrapreneur in Corporate America. And then, as our conversation evolves, I'll tell more about that story. But I think I found my entrepreneurship later in my life, which I think is probably true of a lot of people.
I love that connection that you create because I can relate personally, I was always an intrapreneur when I worked in the corporate space, always. I was solving problems, I was seeing problems that others weren't seeing people well above my pay grade. And it wasn't anything special other than I was an intrapreneur, I was, you just have it, you just have a knack for seeing things that could be done better, could be done faster, could be done with the team more in mind. So tell us more about how you connected the dots between intrapreneurship and entrepreneurship.
Well, I related to everything that you just said and I ended up joining the insurance industry and most people think, how boring, no one likes insurance and I get that, but I lucked out and I was in commercial lines and commercial lines meant every, and I was a risk underwriter in the very beginning. So every single day was something different. I mean, it was a hotel chain, a construction company, manufacturing, so it fed my curiosity and of course you learn how to deal with people and ask questions and be curious about things and all that was really interesting. But very quickly I started to rise from a leadership perspective and I ended up being promoted a lot and I reached a very high level in my professional life there. But I kind of continued the journey that my childhood had started. I moved every three to four years. And it was the same thing you just mentioned, Vicki. It was where is there a problem to be solved? Who's going to think outside the box and they would send me. And I loved it. So I really actually got used to every three or four years, where next? What next is on the horizon? And I just really enjoyed that constant problem solving and then figuring out how to get people to work together. And actually I kind of think of myself as someone that never thought about the boundaries of physical location.
One of my first management jobs for one company was in Ohio and there were three branch offices. And I didn't think anything about that. They had an underwriting department in three places I was managing. And we just got on conference calls. We did it once a week. And it's like, we were one team we just happened to have some people on the phone. Until there was all this stuff about virtual work, I never really thought about how, I just had never seen that as a barrier. There's always a way to communicate. And you're talking to your agents or your brokers or whatever on the phone. You're talking to your attorney it's just, it was a construct that just never really struck me as a barrier. So, that's kind of how it all happened. And then at a certain point it was like, okay, I'm done with this. And I up and left and joined my first startup.
Tell us about that. Tell us about that week because that's a pretty risky move for someone who was studying risk and insurance.
Yeah, well, I have to say there was a little bit of a cushion because this wasn't a particularly well structured startup, but I didn't know that at the time because I had never worked outside of the corporate space. So they paid me a nice salary to move to New York. They didn't want to give options, they didn't want to give stock for a variety of family reasons and so the structure actually ended up contributing to the fact that it did not succeed.
So I didn't really feel a huge financial risk making the transition. And that's what brought me to New York and one thing led to another. And I never looked back. But I was hired really for all the talents that I developed in the corporate world. Because if you're leading groups of people, you wear all the hats and you have to stand in their shoes and understand what makes each person in the organisation tick and how to make them work together. And so often, that's the problem with early stage companies is they've got a brilliant idea and then they're assembling these teams of, however they get them because I know money is always tight for startups. Particularly in the beginning, you’re not, certainly there's not as much seed funding going on around these days, but you're trying to cobble together teams and the personalities are different, there's pressures and those are all challenges and that's really what I was hired to do in this first startup because it was funded and it had a lot going for it.
In fact, it really, interestingly, it's followed, I was attracted to it because it was all about expertise location. And the very original idea was to create call centres in the cloud. This is in the year 2000, way ahead of its time. So things we don't even think about today. But the idea was to connect knowledge workers deep in organisations through the internet so they could be called upon to answer questions, contribute to work projects, whatever it was, but they would never sit in a call centre. They were knowledge workers. And so that was the idea. And obviously it's all come true, but not for that company. And that's unfortunately sometimes what happens. But that's kind of what made me make the jump. I mean, the idea of what we were trying to create and then really to wear those hats in a very entrepreneurial environment was kind of irresistible.
Plus they softened the risk.
What is it about people that energises you? What is it about this part of making a business successful, the resourcing with human resources?
Well, that's a complicated question, but a good one. And I think at the end of the day, fundamentally what attracts me to all the things I've done is that people have such fabulous ideas. I mean, everyone's living their life in their unique community and circumstances, and they're solving problems every single day. And then suddenly someone says, I don't necessarily say it's a commercial value, but there's a value in trying to scale this idea, whether it's for purpose or financially. To me, I also think the two go hand in hand.
So I find that so interesting about humans is that this entrepreneurial spirit, even if people don't consider themselves that, people do pursue things with inventiveness every day, even people who don't consider themselves entrepreneurs. What that's translated to me into Results Resources today, which is the company I founded and what I want to do, my purpose is to empower the purpose of others. And so I see how I can, because of my experience as hiring freelancers and having been successful at finding good ones and working with them collaboratively, that was a talent that I thought I could share with other entrepreneurs and it was a way to scale a company without having to invest, premature decisions about talent, first of all, and then not getting the right talent. And so I've translated my interest in helping people's ideas expand with ‘how do I help them do that’ by matching them with people that have skill sets that can contribute to that success.
Yeah, I love this and because there are so many people that I know in the gig economy. I mean, I was as well at one point freelance graphic design. And sometimes as a freelancer, it's hard to find clients. So you kind of connect the business owner to the freelancer. It makes so much sense. It's so valuable to have people like you in the industry. Heads up if you are a freelancer, check out Elizabeth's business.
Well, I do have to warn you about that at some point because I've learned some interesting lessons about the freelance side of the business.
Yeah, and there's definitely challenges on both sides, I'm sure. So, what do you see as the future of the gig economy?
I see it only growing. I've been working in this field for about 12 years now. So I really feel like I was actively engaged in this when some of the leading platforms that are publicly traded companies today were just little ideas. I was already working with those platforms to hire people and got really good at doing that. So I think that we've gone from that experimental environment to where it's really mainstream. Tons of businesses all over the world hire from platforms. A lot of major companies are creating their own platforms. A lot of the big consulting companies have created their own platforms, both to post project work, as well as a feeder system for potential consultants and for consultants that are on the bench to find work. So I think that's definitely something that's happening. Plus, I see an explosion, what I would call CXOs, people that are leaving corporate America that have had leading roles at different levels and hanging out a shingle because now there's mechanisms, there's platforms and groups that are facilitating the sale of fractional work. So I think fractional work is just gonna keep growing because it just makes so much sense. And I think a lot of people are both frankly, employers and contractors in the same equation. I mean, no one thinks twice about outsourcing legal work to an attorney, but that's fractional work. That is gig work. Same to a web designer or a graphic designer, a bookkeeper, a CPA. We've been outsourcing work, gig work forever. And of course, it's commonly known for the music world as well, but it's been around a long time. But now we have technology that makes it more available, more broadly available, cost effectively to many, many people all over the world.
Yeah, and so much value in it for those in the startup space. Because when you are just starting out, you probably don't need a full-time accountant, right? You just need someone to help you balance your books in the beginning until you take off and maybe then you hire later. But it makes so much sense, but often people in that startup space get very overwhelmed and don't even know where to start. So where does one start to find a gig employee to just help them get over those first hurdles?
Well, I have to say it's not easy. I mean there's lots of choices, lots of options out there, and it's really hard to know what is the right one. And without being overly self-promoting, that's part of why I developed the company I did, because we want to resource results. Results Resourcing, that's why we named the company that. We want to work with clients to help them get matched with the right talent that we've vetted for them. I mean, we operate as both a technology platform, which I designed and developed exclusively with the solopreneur, small business buyer in mind, but also a bit like a staffing agency, where we're actually going to invest time talking to people to understand their needs. Because honestly, many times they don't really understand what they need. They know they have a particular objective, but we help them reverse engineer that to figure out, ok, if you want to be here, here's several intermediary steps that you probably need to consider before doing that. And I have a wealth of experience myself hiring freelancers. So I can speak from experience both myself as well as all the customers we've helped over the years. We've sorted through this problem multiple times. But that's really the age old problem is there's a huge supply of talent, but finding the one that really suits your needs is the hard part. And for most small businesses, if your main option is to go to platforms, but then you're talking to technology, no one is going to spend any time with you because there's not a cost-effective way to do that. Or you hire somebody that is recommended to you by your friend or your neighbour, but they don't really know your business. And they're just, hey, talk to this person. You're doing all this time, all this work to try to vet people. And which is why we built the business we did, because we want to do that for them and the technology makes it cost-effective for us to do without.
So is it the cost effectiveness that's the unique selling point of when you pick this up against say a recruitment agent? Or is there more advantages?
Well, that's one of them. But recruitment agencies generally don't specialise in contract talent. They're looking at placing employees that they get a percentage of the annual salary. And it's a bigger ticket item. Unless you have technology, the spend on any smaller entrepreneur or client, if you think about the disparate needs they have, they're not spending a ton of money on any one thing. So it's not that attractive to a staffing agency let’s say, unless it's like contract labour work, medical, travelling nurses, those are all things that they've, but actually they've all developed platforms to platforms and people to do that kind of stuff. So I think the platform's key, but I think it's really understanding the opportunity. And to me, the opportunity with small business is that it's so large as a group. I mean, there's 27 million solopreneurs in the United States, those are non-employee firms. There's another 6 million that have less than 10 to 15 employees. All told that's 33 million businesses that need talent, but they're so disaggregated. They're all different kinds, all different places. And how do you help all those people? You really can't, other than finding something. I chose to develop technology to address this particular market segment because that was the one thing I could control is the cost of serving people with a human interaction to help them understand and get better freelance matches.
Yeah
I was going to say I think that human interaction is so important in this day and age, this day and age, I sound like an old woman, but things are changing so quickly and we lean on technology and we think we need to do more of this stuff ourselves because the tech makes it easy but it doesn't necessarily make it easy. And in the intro, I said there are people in this phase of business where they know they need to scale and they know they need to bring the right people on, but it really feels overwhelming. Do you coach people? Do you help them understand? Obviously they know why it's important, but how do you manage people in that situation to overcome those obstacles that they have?
That's a problem that exists for every entrepreneur. And where I've ended up going is what I call the ROI of time. And the first thing that I end up talking to people about is what's an hour of your time worth. And it's never $10. So if they stop thinking about the cash they have on hand and they start thinking about the value of their time, it shifts them into a different mindset. It doesn't solve the cash problem, but they start to appreciate the fact that, okay, there's all this core, what I call core work of the business, which is revenue generating. That's what your clients value. This is why they come to you. And then there's all this non-core work that's a cost to the business. You still need to do it to run your business and to run a decent business in things like accounting or whatever it might be. But there's lots of needs. And my whole idea is every business has a back room. Every 27 million solopreneurs have a back room and they should not be doing that work.
One of my favourite business leaders is Peter Drucker and he often said, do what you do best and outsource the rest. And he said that 60 years ago. It's still brilliant. And that's really what people should do. Now I advocate a kind of dip your toe in the water approach. Don't try to outsource it all. What are the two to three to five things that are absorbing the most amount of your time and then that's who you should focus on finding as the person that can relieve those things because it's going to free you up to focus on whatever you do, the idea you're nurturing, the clients you're trying to serve. And the more time you have to do that, the more creative you get about adding value and one thing leads to another. I mean, sometimes that involves a leap of faith that, yeah, I'm going to hire somebody to outsource these functions and I'm going to figure out a way to pay for it. But at the end of the day, if you don't do that, you never scale. You're stuck because the stuff that has to get done day to day to run the business ends up taking time away from serving clients, thinking up new services, things like that. So that's kind of how I've chosen to solve it. In fact, I really created a little tool. A technology tool that's on our website, it’s called the ROI of time calculator. And it takes like three minutes to do. I don't use it as a marketing tool, but it's extraordinary because people, I will see multiple IP addresses taking the same survey with different values. The average is $170 an hour, but 57% of everyone that's ever taken the survey is spent on the back room.
So I think people that value their time are the ones that really have the best chance of scaling, because they're going to be taken on entrepreneurial risk to get help on the things that they shouldn't be doing. And they're probably not that good at anyway. And what you said, Vicki, about DIY, that having all this technology makes you think you can do it, but it's such a waste of time.
Yeah, I'm with you 100%. You almost feel guilty though if you're outsourcing something that it's so easy, you just get the tech to do it. No, I still say no, I don't want to look at it, I'm giving it to someone else to do. It's a trap that we can fall into. And I love how you said the other alternative is that you don't scale. I mean, what's the opportunity cost of that? Terrifying. Like really, if that's the vision for your company and you're now you're going to throw your hands up in the air and say, we're just going to stay as a lifestyle business and make enough money to live. No, come on. You know, dream big. Go after the dreams. Make it happen. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly.
Yeah, I love that. And I love the idea of calculating your time, the value of your time. I remember I had a boss years ago and I remember her, we were having a discussion about, should you or should you not hire a housekeeper? And she's like, well, figure out how many hours you spend a week cleaning your house. I was like, okay, yeah. And then she's like, figure out how much you get paid per hour to work, to do work that you charge clients for. I was like, okay, yeah. She goes, is there a difference in the amount? And how much does a housekeeper cost? So that's another part of the equation. So if a housekeeper is $30 an hour and you get paid $100 an hour, is it worth you earning $70 in that hour but getting more time to work or rest and you still get $70 an hour? And I was like, that makes so much sense when you just flip it versus going, I can't afford $30 an hour. That's a lot of money to give up, right? But it's flipping the mindset. It's a valuable lesson. And I love that you have a calculator because I think most of us do not realise the value of our time at all. Yeah. But we want to stay in the space of creativity because that's where entrepreneurs shine. That's why we're entrepreneurs. Because we're creating something, bringing something into the world that the world needs. Why are we spending our time doing the bookkeeping, which, you know, I don't want, no one wants to do. If you don't send the invoices, you don't get paid. So it's super important.
But the thing is, the accountants and the bookkeepers love to do that work, which I think is another cool thing. I mean, if you outsource the stuff you don't want to do to somebody that loves to do that work, then it's fulfilling for both sides. And, you know, so I think that also funds into the equation. It's just finding it's back to finding the right person that is expert and has chosen to do that.
Yeah, hire people who are better than you at whatever you need doing. Golden rule.
Yeah, and sometimes entrepreneurs have to get out of the way too in business. I think when businesses start scaling, sometimes the entrepreneur is the one in the way, automatically the entrepreneur wants to be the CEO, wants to keep leading the business, but sometimes they're not the right person to lead. Maybe they're the creative director. You know, they're constantly coming up with great ideas, but you kind of reach a point where your business has 12, 15 employees. Now you've got to manage people. A creative entrepreneur is not going to be happy having to manage people all day long. So that's where you really got to make different choices.
And the people are gonna feel it. They're gonna know that's not the skill set of that person. And it's really the kind of more enlightened person that recognises that somebody else is gonna be better at that.
So Elizabeth, what about AI?
Well, I was talking a little bit earlier about the fact we've been outsourcing gig work forever, and I actually have the same kind of feeling about AI. It's become a buzzword, but artificial intelligence is really machines doing work called what other names of it like workflow, or analysis. There's so many things out there that have done work by machines and not to lessen what's happening today with Chat GPT and machine learning and natural language processing. Those are all very different things I don't want to diminish that but I basically have the opinion that work has been done by machines for a long time and so more and more sophisticated work is possible. AI is in my technology. It's in all kinds of technology and now we're using it for different things that more and more consumers are using on a day-to-day basis. And I think that it's good. It basically streamlines things. It makes analysis faster, quicker. The depth of data that can be analysed is broader. But I also think there's some drawbacks to it. And we read about them every day, the hallucinations, the incorrect information. And so I think that to me, there's a line where technology ends and human beings have to take over. And whether it's adding fact checking or adding the client voice to an article that was written or whatever, you can tell if ChatGP wrote it. And it's so obvious. And so if you're really trying to reach people with your unique vision of the world, it's not going to happen. AI has only been trained on a certain amount of data up to a certain point. So if you ask something that happened last month, it's not going to know anything about that. So I just think that we have to always balance the benefits of what technology can bring us with what humans can then do with it. And I think some of the best freelancers are already incorporating AI in their work, not to do the work for them, but to help them do the work more effectively so then they can spend their time. It's kind of the same thing, the core and the non-core work. Let AI do the non-core work and then the human comes in and adds the value. And it can assure the client that they're efficiently using time and, frankly, can help the client know when to use it and when not to. Because I think a lot of people look at it as the short answer. And ultimately, it's not going to be.
And I think it's a great time now for entrepreneurs to be embracing technology. I mean, I think being a graphic designer my whole career, technology has evolved tremendously since I started, you know, as a 16 year old working in the back room for a retail company doing paste ups and to now it used to take me two weeks to create an ad, now I can do it in two hours, and it's just the addition of lots of technology that I've constantly had to keep up with in my career. And I think if you embrace that mindset that it's just new technology, how do we use it effectively in our business? Not to replace people necessarily, but to make everybody more efficient and therefore you can do more with that time that you then have or better with that time that you have. I think that's the value of AI that people miss. We fear the robots taking the jobs. The people during the industrial revolution were fearing the same thing, right? Like we're losing all of our jobs and the factories are taking over. But people still had jobs and the population kept growing and the economy kept moving. It just evolved. So we're in another evolution right now. And yeah, the mindset is what really matters, I think.
Yeah, I totally agree. Totally agree. I mean, I think there are going to be some jobs that are more prone to being done by technology. I mean, a lot of financial work increasingly, you know, there's initial work done by technology. And I think we do a lot of work in the area of virtual assistance. And I don't use a T, I use A-N-C-E because I have strong feelings about a person is not scalable, a team is. And that's a different philosophy about how early stage companies can scale as well. But I think that there's a number of firms around the world that specialize in providing virtual assistance. And some of those are very transactional kind of roles. And I think over time, AI is going to do more and more of that work. Driving people, the smartest people are going to be the ones that realize where their value takes off. And so that line is going to constantly move in terms of what technology can do. And I think people need to figure out how to keep up, keep ahead.
Yeah, so that really takes us to the conversation about virtual assistants. And there are some countries on our beautiful planet who are really leaning into that as an exportable industry, I guess. We look to the Philippines, we look to India for virtual assistants and teams of virtual assistants. Your thoughts, your thoughts on that and the globalization of it, which clearly you were across in the early stages of your career, but where are we going with all of that?
Well, I think that a virtual assistant or virtual assistants team is probably one of the most valuable roles that an early stage company can invest in because that's either an individual or a team that could do a broader range of things that you can outsource the back room to virtual assistants. So I'm a big believer in it. I've chosen to focus on the United States and Canada, where most of our clients are in the United States or Canada. And the reason I've done that is because while there's super smart people all over the world, and people speak and write English well all over the world, they didn't grow up here. They don't know how business is done in one state or the other, or the United States or Canada. And there's a value in that very practiced, lived experience. And so we're probably not for everyone, particularly if someone's on a really tight budget. But at the end of the day, when our clients come to us for that virtual assistant that can be a thought leader, can add creativity, add resourcefulness to the equation, that's what they come to us for. If people are looking to outsource rote actions, then there's other solutions around the world. But it also comes back to the value of time with people's work practices are different all over the world. Could be highly hardworking, but if they don't know, if they need a step-by-step instruction for everything that happens, and you happen to be an entrepreneur that's not a process person, doesn't have a step-by-step instruction, there's a mismatch. You're gonna think you're gonna get something for an inexpensive price, but you're not gonna get what you paid for, and you're gonna invest a lot of time trying to make it happen.
And those are just pros and cons, you know, that's always part of that balancing act that needs to happen. But I think that in the early days of Results Resourcing, we actually would find that and curate freelance talent in just about any endeavour with the exception of software and salespeople. Software because most, I did not want to be trying to underwrite someone's technical architecture to make good match. So I ruled out that and then sales and freelancing I don't think is a good match. People need to be really motivated to sell things and freelancers are more doers. But other than that, that's what we did in the beginning. But over time we migrated more and more towards what I would call virtual assistance teams. And we did that because our clients kept coming back to us and most of them are small, solopreneurs of small businesses, they needed competent, reliable, nice, and they needed it right now. I mean, that was the four things they kept asking for. Competent in a variety of things, and what they needed day one wasn't necessarily what they needed day three, or 10, or 20, and they didn't want to have to hire a different freelancer in the 30 days. And so I migrated really towards this idea of teams, because I think teams are so scalable, and they can grow and change as the business does, as the business owner does, a virtual assistant is going to be a generalist, is never going to be an expert in every CRM system that's out there, and bookkeeping and graphic design, for example. Might be strong in one thing, but can't be great at everything. That again is the beauty of a team, you can have, some of the teams that we represent have 15 people, and they have, there's a bookkeeper, there's a paralegal, there's a graphic designer, there's a web developer, there's an SEO person. Are they at the top of the game like a digital agency? Probably not. But for that business owner, that entrepreneur that's really trying to launch their business is probably a pretty great start and a good value to get it all in one team structure. So as their needs change, there isn't this huge friction, this loss of knowledge by moving from one person to the next. So the now part is they don't want to wait three weeks to find somebody. They have something they need done now and so having pre-vetted teams that can be up and running in 24 to 48 hours is really attractive to people because they know they're going to get somebody competent, reliable, nice, and right now.
I see so much value in that from a branding perspective because if an entire team understands a business's brand, it's going to make it seamless across whatever they do because they'll understand the values, the purpose, the mission, all the important things that any business is going to want to continue to portray in their marketing or anything that's outwardly facing a team that gets to know the brand and everyone in the team knows it versus cobbling together your own team, which then you've got to train each individual person. And if each individual freelancer is working for 10 other clients, I can see how it's so much harder for them to really focus in on their business. So for these teams, I guess my question is, do they only work for one client? Do you build a team per client or are they just teams that have multiple clients and you figure out which team works best for an incoming client?
The latter, they're not my teams, actually. They are independent. They are freelance businesses you know, they are entrepreneurs. They run a virtual assistance agency, for example. And I like that because they are entrepreneurs. They understand their client. They live that life. And they are motivated to build a sustainable, dynamic, growing business. And they keep on top of technology. There isn't corporate telling them to do things. They just know they need to do it because they see the work environment and want to keep up and want to be the best in their fields. And they hire people that are best in individual specialties but the umbrella is the man or the woman that owns that virtual assistance agency. So I find that it ends up being a really dynamic solution because I'm a coordinator, I'm a matchmaker in the beginning. Then our technology does all the back-end processing, you know, and the payment management, things like that. And we actually take work off the shoulders of these teams, because we're bringing them pre-vetted clients to your point earlier, Laura, about how hard it is to find good clients. Well, essentially, our platform finds good clients for the freelance teams that we work with. And because we do this phone conversation, we've already created, to use your language, a creative brief about the client. So they get a pre-vetted client with a creative brief and they can just start, get started. You're not starting from square one. And that actually kind of gets me back into my warning earlier about the freelancer side. What I think is holding some freelancers back is the fact that they leave corporate environments that have been structured and they've always gotten their work through those kinds of environments and they really don't know how to run a business. They don't know how to get clients. And so I get a lot of people saying, I know somebody that just did this and it could be working for some blue chip company at some really superb level, but it doesn't mean that one of my clients is going to find that they can relate to that person. So I mean, it's a really interesting education. I think more and more freelancers really need to be not side hustles, but this is my business and I'm going to build a business around being whatever professional skill I have.
I love that you just said that because that to me was the thing that changed my career trajectory, was going from calling myself a freelancer to calling myself a business owner. And I did that after a few years of being an entrepreneur, doing it on my own. I started because I had to, not because I wanted to in the beginning. And I just called myself a freelancer because I didn't know better. But when I changed myself to business owner and literally I just changed my email signature, that simple. I just changed it from freelancer to owner, the response changed. Absolutely. The clients changed, the response to me changed, and it was just a mindset shift. And I think that's valuable for people to know. So if you're in the gig economy, you are a freelancer. You don't have to call yourself that. You can be a solo entrepreneur and own your company. You have a company, you own it, it's you. Name yourself that. Name yourself CEO of your own business.
Exactly. Well, when I do use in our materials, I do talk about freelancers because that's what people search for. But I always put professional freelance, professional freelance pro because I want to differentiate from somebody that's just doing some freelance side hustle work, not to devalue that. But it's like my clients come to me for results. So I've got skin in the game. I can't match them with somebody that might work. I need to match them with people that are going to deliver the goods. And so I think that's a really important mentality in being a business owner, even not even if, I mean, there's 27 million solopreneurs out there. That's huge, the number of people that run businesses as individuals and some of them can be really big. But there's just an attitude in ownership, which obviously you already recognise when you made the shift yourself.
Yeah, thank you, Elizabeth. There's so much to cover. I think in the interest of time now might be the opportunity to flip the script. If it's okay with you, we would love for you to ask us any question that you might have of us.
I have two. Is that okay? So first of all, I'd like to have you tell me the story behind 241. I have my own theory, but I'm curious. And then I'm interested in hearing from you. What were the top one or two opportunities that you help your clients take advantage of?
Great questions. I'll answer the story of Two Four One and allow Vicki the second one, if you don't mind. That'd be a great way to start. So Two Four One began with a triathlon. Not that either of us are triathletes, okay? So what happened was you were both contracted to work with the Bermuda Tourism Authority to help promote a triathlon in Bermuda. Now, this is the big world series of triathlon, not a small one and we did all the work together. So I was the graphic designer for the project and Vicki was the communications and marketing professional. And they paired us together.I'd known of Vicki, but I didn't really know her before then. So during our time working together, and it was a few months of creating tons and tons of work, we really got to know each other and we really enjoyed working together. And I say, I've never worked with someone that made my work better constantly without ever insulting me in the process. It was just how about this? And how about that? Or what if we, and this is great, but, and it always felt so collaborative. And sometimes she sent me content, I'd be like, well, what if we just switched this word? And she'd be like, yeah. And it just felt like this increasingly better work that we both did and we were both so proud of. And that was in 2019. And after the project finished, I asked Vicki for a coffee date, I said, listen, I love working with you, how do we work together more? Because this was just such a great collaboration. I want to do more of it. So we started trying to figure out a business. We started, I mean, two branding experts, you know, trying to come up with our own branding was a fun challenge. You know, overthinking everything, right? I loved it so much. Building our own thing was just so, so invigorating. I can't even start. And so we built our values. We built our name, our mission, all the things and started building a website and business cards and all that good stuff. And we were going to go into employer branding, which is basically where you work with big corporations to brand internally and really help improve culture and communication and all that. And then the pandemic hit and we went, yeah, no one wants that because everyone suddenly was working from home, you know, everything changed and we found quickly that there were so many solo entrepreneurs, business owners, retail stores that just weren't online, didn't have a website, barely had social media. They were used to foot traffic and word of mouth and business. And all of a sudden everything had changed. And we started working with a business development agency in Bermuda and they asked us, could we help them do some webinars? Cause of course that's what everybody was doing. Everyone was home and it was like, let's do a webinar on this and let's do a webinar on that. And we jumped on the opportunity and said, sure. We can teach people marketing because we know marketing inside and out. And it started there. And I remember how terrifying it was to do our first webinar. Like a hundred and something people, I was like, how many people? That's a lot of people. But we went down that educational space and we did more and more workshops, webinars. We started a course on marketing to help people. We worked with nonprofit agencies and small business owners and then it evolved into a radio show, which then evolved into this podcast. And we also, I'll let Vicki talk about all the things we do and how we help people now, because that'll evolve into that. But yeah, in the middle of it, Vicki decided to move to Australia, when we were just starting the business. But thanks to the pandemic, Zoom became such a normal part of life and business. Everyone was on it, everyone was using it. It wasn't just corporate people doing their virtual meetings. It was everybody, so it made it really easy to just continue a business. So yeah, we've been working together, running this business, doing work for lots of clients as well as this amazing podcast since. So it's been a great ride. Yeah. Thanks for asking.
Wow, really cool, really cool. I mean, Zoom's amazing. I mean, it's like we could all be in three different sections of New York right now. I mean, it's like, who knows? It's pretty incredible, the span of geography that we're talking over today.
Manhattan, Bermuda and Brisbane. It's great. It's 10 o'clock at night so if I could pass a glass of wine through the screen to you ladies, I would. Yeah. So Elizabeth, your other question was, what are a couple of opportunities that we support people with? Yeah.
Mm-hmm. Well, just the most common things you've found working with your clientele.
The people we work with that we're really focusing on are people who are starting a new business or a new part of their business and they're looking to launch well. So quite often we come across people who've had an idea, they've worked on their idea for a very long time, they've trickled it out into the market and they weren't getting the results they wanted.
Luckily, we also are in the right spaces where we can get to people before they triple it out. And that's where the sweet spot is, of course, is being prepared in knowing your product, having tested your product, understand the market, get the messaging right, understand what a launch really will, what the best launch is for your product or for your business and for your potential clients. So we work with them on the strategy side of a launch. And then in many cases, we'll also walk alongside them for the first few weeks of the launch.
It's a fun space to be in. I mean, the beginning stage, the startup space, I mean, you're in it as well. It's such an exciting time for businesses. It's also stressful, overwhelming time. So we love to just help people launch out the gate. And there's so much opportunity in the launch space because that's when you have the most opportunity to get your name out there by using press, social media, a new website, radio. interviews, like there's so many opportunities to make a lot of noise because people are interested because of new, right? So anything new is a great hook. I mean, Vicki and I both come from news backgrounds, Vicki was in broadcast journalism, I was in newspaper journalism. And so we know the importance of that press, the press loves new. So when you have something new, that's the time to make as much noise in the market as possible but there's a couple of important things like Vicki just mentioned about making sure your products, right? Your websites, collecting orders, you know, don't tell people you come by on my website and there's a broken link and you know, they can't actually buy. Right. So we help people figure those things out in the very beginning and make sure everything's audited, ready to go. Social media looks great. People connecting there's, all your links are good, little things like that. And we love helping people in that space.
Not so little. I mean, it's like the space you're in, there's so many pieces that need to work together to really be successful, especially with social media. I find people looking for miracles, not really appreciating what it takes. A website, it just sits there unless you do all these other things, you know, and you build it the right way and you market it the right way. It's just so I find that, many, many cuts of clients come to us specifically for marketing needs. So you're really echoing what I've been experiencing. Yeah.
Yeah, it's all about strategy. It really is with everything. And Laura would speak to that about the brand as well. Don't just create a logo because you like a shape or because you want to use a couple of colours. Really dig deep into the strategy of that. Understand that there's a whole psychology behind different colours and shapes and fonts and the whole nine. And Laura has conducted full courses on those things alone and helps our clients with those things. So strategy, strategy, strategy.
Such a great space to be in and such a great opportunity to have a great conversation with you, Elizabeth. I think it's so helpful for solo entrepreneurs and startups to figure out where the resources are. You know, often we don't know where to start and you sound like you've created that. You've created that place to start, to have that conversation, check out the ROI calculator of your time. I think that's brilliant. I think that's so helpful for people to get an idea around that. So that you're spending time in your business on the things that drive the results. It just makes sense. So thank you so much for this amazing, enlightening, valuable conversation for entrepreneurs of any stage of business, because whether you're just starting out or you're looking to scale or you've been in it for a long time and you just know you need the help, go out there. There are resources to go find and to let us all level up, continuously level up our businesses, because that's what it's all about. So thank you, thank you, thank you. It's been a great conversation.
Thank you, this was really fun. Great way to start the day.
Perfect. Agreed.
