Perspectives: Build work around your values and priorities
How to give yourself a permission slip to do things differently.
This week’s Perspectives is a conversation with Jenni Gritters, a business coach and strategist for self-employed creatives and solopreneurs. She also runs a boutique content agency.
Jenni and I met when she invited me to host a workshop for SUSTAIN, her group coaching program. She also publishes
. You can learn more at jennigritters.comThis interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Anna Burgess Yang: Tell me a little bit about your background and your career.
Jenni Gritters: I got a master's in journalism. I walked out of school with a little bit of debt and realized that the landscape for jobs was not great. I had a lot of small jobs, which is pretty common for someone in media. And then I had a couple of full-time jobs.
My first job was at a viral media company funded by venture capital. We had to grow really, really fast. I was in charge of generating millions of page views per month with a team of five people. I was there for about a year and a half, and I burned out so hard. Twelve-hour days, during an election cycle... I fried myself. I was so exhausted that I left with nothing else planned.
I ended up freelancing for a few months. I liked freelancing, but my husband was in graduate school at the time, and we couldn't make it work financially. So I took another full-time job, stayed for a year and a half, and got laid off.
I had a couple of interviews for communications and journalism jobs. It was the same shit, different toilet. I thought to myself, "I don't think I can do this again." I decided that I really wanted to try working for myself. This was in 2018. I wrote a business plan to run my own writing company. And it worked — I'm here.
ABY: What did your business look like when you first started versus what does it look like today?
JG: I've launched four businesses between 2018 and now, a couple of which are iterations of the first one. When I first started, I was a traditional freelancer and would take work from anyone who would give it to me. I branded myself as a health and fitness writer. I was a yoga teacher, and my master's degree was in science journalism. But the work was very discrepant: small projects, big projects, a lot of little pieces.
That worked great for a few years. Then I had kids and didn't have as much time to work. I had a baby within the first two months of the pandemic. We didn't have childcare; I had him at home with me, and I had to run a business. So it forced a lot of changes. I had to refine things. I had to raise my rates and be really clear about who I worked with.
Then I added coaching. I started a podcast business that a lot of people know me for (and left after a few years). So there are iterations and evolutions. Now, I run a $30k/month business. I've learned a lot, and there's a lot more complexity to my business now, to be really honest, which is both good and bad.
ABY: What has been the biggest change for you since you started your own business?
JG: I think it's my health. I really do. I know that's an interesting answer, but when I was spending 12 hours on a computer, I had really bad neck and back tension. I was clenching my jaw. I just didn't feel good, and my nervous system was super dysregulated. I was always in survival mode.
I work 25 hours per week now. We moved to the woods. I walk around in the trees. I coach people with voicemail apps while I'm hiking. It's very idyllic. I feel well, I take naps, and I eat better. I think it's because of the intentionality that I'm able to have. Someone else isn't choosing or dictating my schedule. I am, and I can flex it up or down, depending on the season.
ABY: And your husband also works for the business, right?
JG: He did for a while; he doesn't anymore. He was basically watching me improve my life, while he was working a traditional job as a nurse at a cath lab in the basement of a hospital. He was on call nights and weekends. And once we had a second kid, it became extra challenging. We started asking a lot of questions about doing things differently.
That was two years ago. He took a leave of absence. I said, "I will see if I can scale up my business and double my revenue." It worked. He helped with a lot of the infrastructure pieces. As I grew my coaching business, he was setting up tools, like a CRM. He's very systems-oriented. He sort of grew out of the role because we don't need as much infrastructure stuff. So he has his own website design agency now.
It's been an adventure working with your partner. It's so complex, but it was really good for us. It gave us more wiggle room, schedule-wise, which I think will resonate with a lot of parents. When he was working as a nurse, he was gone 60 hours per week. I was the primary parent, but also trying to grow my business. When he left, suddenly, we were in charge of our schedule. It was a big shift and really good when we had a newborn.
ABY: What do you like about coaching people?
JG: It's my favorite thing. I think what I loved about journalism was the teaching. I like writing and talking to people, but I chafed at a lot of the journalistic norms. I was never going to be the one reporting on tragedies and big things happening in the world. I don't feel like I found my place, career-wise, until I started coaching.
People started asking me, "Do you coach?" I tried it, and then got a full certification. I love how honest it is. I think we walk around the world having surface-level conversations, and all day, I talk about real things. I like looking at people's businesses or work situations and figuring out how we can change them so they can get their needs met. That feels like important work to me.
I ask questions like, "What are your values? What do you care about right now? What are your priorities? And how do we structure work based on those things?" It's very life-first. It feels a little rebellious, too. I get a lot of people who question the way things are and ask if they can be different. And I get to say, "Yes, they can."
ABY: The landscape of employment has changed a lot over the past 2+. Both for self-employed people and people who are working full-time for an employer. What do you see, or what are you hearing from people?
JG: I think it's a giant permission slip to do things differently. People who are adapting and trying new things are doing fine. Those who keep doing things the way they used to do them are having a hard time.
In the self-employment space, marketing works differently now. People do not want to be cold-pitched. There's a lot more relationality, and that's hard for people who've previously had a lot of success sending cold-pitch emails. It just doesn't work anymore.
People are applying for full-time jobs after being laid off and not getting hired. I feel more stable working for myself. So I'm having a lot of conversations, asking, "Is this actually true? Is a job [with an employer] more stable? What would it look like to set something else up that's more stable?"
My business is thriving because a lot of people are asking questions about work and how to create something that works for them. I think it's a post-pandemic thing. And also the economy and inflation. And we're all tired of being only online. There are some nuances that have changed the way we want to interact with each other.
ABY: What do you say to someone who is thinking about leaving a full-time job? Do you encourage it, or do you help them try to think through their options?
JG: If you're a person who finds yourself in that little twisty thing of, "Can I do it in a way that works for me?" The answer is yes. But you probably need a community, or a coach, or a friend, or someone to work through that. Because a lot of the blueprints out there are really a) not built for parents, b) not built for women, and c) not built for anybody who has chronic illness. Those are a huge subset of my clients. I help people build unique business models because they come in and have unique needs. I have clients who work six months out of the year and then travel six months. I work with clients who only have ten hours a week to work. Whatever it is, we can probably figure it out.
People who love the freedom of time and creative challenges will thrive working for themselves. People who really would prefer to be directed, who want to put their energy somewhere other than work, maybe that's not the right fit. We start there. At this point, about 80% of the people I have that conversation with want to at least try working for themselves. If you're itchy and craving and feeling a little rebellious, people usually choose to leave their jobs, and then we figure it out. I call it the offboarding plan. It's like a little off-ramp from your job. How will you do it in a way that feels safe to you? Will you turn your employer into your first client and shrink them down to part-time? There are ways I think that it can be a smooth exit.
I have people come to me who aren't sure if they have the skillset to be self-employed. They don't think they have the hustle. My whole business is predicated on the idea that you can build a sustainable business without the hustle. I know a lot of what people see is a hustle version that's maybe more sparkly and shiny and popular, but you don't have to do it that way.
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