Behind the podcast – Lynne & Rachel talk about their partnership

Rachel Smith: Hello and welcome to The Content Byte, a podcast for freelancers who use their words to make money. I’m Rachel Smith, a freelance journalist, copywriter, and content producer. I’m also the founder of Rachel’s List, a jobs board and community for Australian writers and other creatives. 

Lynne Testoni: I’m Lynne Testoni! I’m a journalist and content writer as well. Rachel and I are your weekly co-hosts, and every week we bring you all kinds of tips, tricks, and some fabulous guests to help you make the most of your freelance business.

This interview is packed with insights and collaboration, whether you’re thinking about a podcast, agency model or a passion project. This episode is a crash course in building something big without burning out or blowing up your business. And yes, this will even tell you how we’ve remained friends after all this time.

Austin L Church: Lynne and Rachel, the last time I saw you two, I was in Sydney with you, and I wish I were still in Sydney with you! I had such a lovely time in your city. 

Rachel: We loved having you. 

Lynne: It was lots of fun. It’s one of the joys of organising something like the summit is that you get to meet people that you’ve always been following and that you really like working with. It’s great conceit really, it gives you a reason to make those calls, send those emails. 

Austin: It’s nice when you don’t regret getting together with them. 

Lynne: Well, hopefully not, we loved having you! We love having you in Sydney and I think everyone got a lot out of your presentation. It was great. Thank you.

Austin: Well, thank you. This is kind of an interesting topic to explore, this idea of partnerships. I know that you two have partnered on The Content Byte Summit, The Content Byte podcast, maybe other things as well, and so you were kind of at the top of my list, because I know that you will be honest about your partnership. 

Before we get into that, why don’t you tell me as individuals about some of the milestones in your careers to date? 

Rachel: Do you want to go first, Lynne? 

Lynne: I’ve got a background as a journalist and I am a writer and an editor, and I specialise in lovely lifestyle content. I write about beautiful homes and architecture and design for both glossy interior magazines, plus also increasingly the last ten years, a lot of corporate clients in that space. I write their content. I also organise a lot of photo shoots and sort of things like that. That’s my main gig. I was an editor of a glossy magazine, and I write about food as well. 

Rachel: I started off in magazines, so I’m a journalist as well. I started off as a sub and then became a features writer and I was a movie reviewer for many years and worked a lot for women’s mags and health magazines.

I went freelancing about 2001 and I pretty much immediately started doing more copy and content, even though magazine work was still really plentiful then, I wanted to edge in that direction, and now that’s become my main thing with a little bit of journalism and custom content in the mix.

Around that same time, 2001, I started Rachel’s List, which was just an email list of writers who wanted to get together for lunch and then to talk shop at a pub and share work. And it became huge. I think that list started with three people and ended up with 800, and I had to keep splitting it up into different emails to send to people because editors started hearing about it and wanted to send me jobs to send to the list. I just thought, this needs to be monetised or be on a website or be easier to manage. So, that’s what I did. I put it on a website in 2012.

From that point, I was juggling both. I’ve been juggling both ever since, my own business and Rachel’s List and now the podcast. 

Austin: I had no idea Rachel’s List had been around that long, and maybe that’s the first point I’ll underline, and this is salient to our conversation about partnerships. Sometimes you try things to see if they’ll work, and then lo and behold, 24 or 25 years later, you’re like, I guess it worked. 

Rachel: It’s funny, it was not something I ever thought would become as big as it’s become or evolve in the way it’s become, it’s been very organic. 

Austin: So how did you two meet and when did you meet?

Rachel: It was through friends.

Lynne: We’ve got lots of mutual friends. I guess because we both worked in magazine land, we knew lots of people in content, in common. I was an editor, and Rachel was one of my writers. When I took on a commissioning editor role at one of the glossy magazines, Rachel was a regular contributor, and I was commissioning her and then I moved to another editor role, and I took Rachel with me. 

You know, it was almost a startup. One company had bought out another company and they needed new writers, and I turned to writers I knew and trusted, which I’m sure every editor does, and Rachel was one of those. Then I commissioned her and a third job she became one of my regulars. But we did know lots of people in common. I guess we were more like work acquaintances before we did the podcast rather than the friends that we are now. 

Rachel: It was kind of a slow burn. She was my editor and with your editors, you’re sort of deferential, but then we kept meeting at writer’s parties and getting to know each other a bit better and became more friends than just work colleagues. 

Austin: I think I probably could have avoided some headaches and heartaches. Certain partnerships I’ve had if I just hired those folks as subcontractors or I hired them to do a job for me before we tried to partner.

When did you two start talking about some kind of collaboration beyond Lynne hiring Rachel as a writer? 

Rachel: I think that Lynne rang me, and it was definitely her idea, the podcast. I felt like I didn’t want to do anything else. I was running two busy businesses, and I also never had time to listen to podcasts whereas Lynne was always out walking the dog and finding good ones and telling me about them. 

I felt like I wasn’t really in that world back then, that’s all really changed now. But when we started, I felt like this outsider to that world, but she was like, we have to do this. It would be great, it’s the time to do it. We did talk about it a few times and then she got me over the lunch. She was very persuasive. 

Lynne: Both of us have been around in the business for a while. I’m a bit older than Rachel. I’ve been freelancing for 10 years now. But heaps of people come to us with questions like, how do you get clients? What do you charge? 

All my friends in media would be made redundant, one at a time and they’d ring me up and say, ‘I’m going to do some work. What do you charge? How do you do this?’ I felt like I was having the same conversations over again, and Rachel too. 

I thought, maybe we should do a podcast that addresses these. Podcasts were big at the time, so the podcast has been going for six years weekly, it’s a hungry beast. That’s probably a bit for later, but I was totally selfish because I didn’t have the same following that Rachel has.

I’ve got friends at parties, but I didn’t have the same reach, so I was totally selfish and maybe more, and I just knew that Rachel had a really strong community and Rachel’s List, and I felt it was a strong place to launch a podcast and to do that. I guess we have complementary skills, we bring different voices, and we do work differently, and I don’t know if we knew that as much. But certainly, that’s brought a strength to the podcast and that’s helped it evolve. 

Rachel: I think it’s a whole other conversation in choosing a co-host, but aside from chemistry, we were super lucky because aside from actual podcast chemistry and liking each other and trusting each other, our skills are quite different and that’s been a huge boon, not just to the podcast, but to the conference as well, which we’ll probably talk about it a bit later.

Austin: Can you talk, even if it’s just a handful of bullet points each about what those complementary skills are. 

Rachel: I think that we really naturally gravitated towards our strengths from the start, and, it has changed a little bit, but for Lynne, I feel like your strengths are really budgets and money and business side of things because you’ve done the proposals for sponsorship. You have more of a business mindset about those things. I could do it, but I think it comes easier to you. You do the majority of the show notes and the guest wrangling. That’s more of a time thing for me because I’m busy on Rachel’s List a lot of the time. Then I do a lot of the social stuff. Email marketing and trying to think about our processes and how we can improve them. We just did a form for people to pitch to us and they can do their elevator pitch, they can upload their photo and their bio and it’s all in the one place and we’re just amazed at why didn’t we do that sooner? 

We are getting smarter about all that sort of stuff. We share writing our newsletter, but I load it up and create the template. Lynne, you write most of the scripts, but I will edit them and add in questions or change aspects. We both research the guests and so the scripts come together between us both, but it’s a mix of tasks, but it’s seamlessly happening somehow. 

Lynne: I think when we started, we didn’t know what a podcast involved. We didn’t know some of those things like the marketing or setting up processes for onboarding guests and we didn’t even know that was involved. It makes sense now and so I guess as the we’ve said, oh, we should do this, this will be better and one of us will take it on.

Austin: I appreciate you just highlighting that it has evolved over time. I think partnerships are like any other relationship where there are some unknowns. I do want to point out one thing, Rachel, I think it was you who said, or maybe it was Lynne, but one of you said, we had good chemistry, and I think that’s really good place to start in a partnership, because you will be spending time together. 

I also want to point out that like any other relationship, a good partnership needs more than good chemistry, because as soon as work gets involved and money gets involved, it’s like chemistry and complementary skill sets because there’s work.

How did the conversation unfold in the conversation, I mean partnership? Did you say we’re going to do an episode, or did you say, we’re going to do a season? Did you put all this down in writing? How did it happen? 

Rachel: I think we were only going to do about six to start with and because of the name, The Content Byte, we made our episodes ten minutes long in the beginning, and my husband is very into music and has all this recording equipment and so he set us up in Lynne’s spare bedroom with mics. Was this just before the pandemic hit? 

Lynne: It was.

Rachel: We recorded six episodes at a time and batching the content helped both of us concentrate on our own businesses, but still create this part of our marketing that we didn’t really know where it was going to go or what would happen.

After a while we realised at the beginning, we had no scripts really. We’d just chat about a topic and then we realised we needed a script and then guests came along, and we really needed scripts because there was two of us interviewing and then we needed an editor. It slowly evolved to where we thought, this is working.

It was definitely through the pandemic where we thought with so many people started losing clients and work and were freaking out about ways to approach clients and ways to still make themselves relevant and useful. We really leveraged that in the podcast and those episodes just went nuts.

Lynne: I think that’s when we doubled down and moved out of my spare room because we couldn’t record in the same place during the pandemic in lockdown. That’s when we started recording remotely, and then we just stayed with that. We had somebody we both knew pitch to us as coming on the podcast as a guest, and that went really well. It was the most successful one we’d done to date. From then on, we started getting more and more guests and that’s where it’s evolved. Rachel and I had enough to talk about by then. We’d done enough, we needed other people!

Austin: I like the fact that it has evolved over time. It hasn’t been this rigid concept of a partnership, but also it sounds like you all have stretched, and you’re still trying to fit each other and accommodate each other. How did you think about ownership? How did you handle expenses like podcast editing and that kind of thing?

Rachel: We split it up.

Lynne: It was simple at first. Phil, Rachel’s husband did the editing, but then, he has a proper job. We couldn’t keep asking what he did to set us up and as a favour, which seemed wrong. So, we found a podcast editor and obviously he charged. He was starting out and he was somebody who had been a stage manager and, in the pandemic, he lost all his work. He was pivoting, so that was great and then basically I paid him one week, Rachel paid in the next week. That’s how we worked it out. 

Then we reached out to a sponsor and that sponsor, Rounded, is an accounting software for freelancers, so really relevant for our audience. Rachel had an existing informal relationship with that company through Rachel’s List, but not a formal, financial arrangement.

We did a presentation, and that sponsorship paid for the editing, not our time. It evolved and then he’s gradually increased and that company’s gradually increased their involvement and they’re paying for more. But it really doesn’t pay for our time. It pays for the editing, it pays for the hosting of the website and the uploading and bits and pieces, but not really the amount of time we spend on it. 

Austin: So, it was just kind of 50/50 when it came to expenses? Did you write down your agreement? Did you have an operating agreement of some sort or was it just less? 

Rachel: No, it was more of a handshake agreement.

Lynne: It’s all on a handshake agreement. I guess you have to point out that we are not talking about huge amounts of money. I mean, maybe there’s a point when the podcast and it will happen, will make money, serious money. Well then probably we should re-look at it.

Rachel: It’s had a lot of other benefits for us. That is a problem because we do bang on a lot about the importance of contracts and agreements on the podcast and, I think it is important. I think working with friends is really fun and it’s tempting not to formalise it, but things can go south. I’ve been in that situation and if lawyers have to get involved, it’s really awful. It’s just not where you want to be with a friend, you know? I think it’s really important.

Lynne: It’s probably something we should do.

Austin: What I hear you saying is your official advice to anyone listening is to have an operating agreement with a partner. 

I have a mentor who says, money makes people stupid, and I think there’s truth in that. Maybe it’s easy to be less stupid if there’s less money involved, but I hear what you’re saying, it hasn’t quite been necessary yet. Even if you all generally tell other people, get it all down and write you too.

Lynne: We do have everything and one of the things is because as Rachel said, I do all the finances. We did get advice from my accountant at the beginning when we did the summit and there was more money involved. We run the expenses through my company. I have a company structure; I think in the US you call it an LLC.

We run it through that and then bit by bit we took all the little informal things that we were paying for by ourselves all through my company, and then it’s through a cost centre and we can reconcile it. It’s gotten formalised in this last year. Once we did the summit, we had to do that because there was quite a lot of money, so we did formalise that and we used my insurance and that was the best way to do it rather than setting up a separate company, which we looked at. It just seemed expensive. 

Rachel: I think it’s interesting because although it belongs to the two of us, it’s also aligned with Rachel’s List. We would have to factor that in somehow in an agreement. That might be why we haven’t yet because it hasn’t really taken off financially. It’s a successful podcast, but if it started to take off, we would have to factor that in because it’s the Rachel’s List podcast, but it’s also something that belongs to us. 

The same thing with the summit. The summit was like a separate business that was linked to the podcast, but because there’s so much crossover with our audiences and the communities, like the podcast community, the Rachel’s List community, it just all was very organic. It’s a tricky situation. We should probably talk to someone about how an agreement might look. But we haven’t done it yet because it hasn’t been super necessary.

The summit though was a different beast. We had full ownership over those conferences. We were very regimented about how we ran them and how we planned them. 

Austin: I think it’s amazing that you all have been in a partnership for six years and you’ve gotten this far with this successful podcast without having, it sounds like there hasn’t been some sort of event or forcing function and I could say, you could look at that as a win, right? I mean, we all know people who have not had that same story. They’ve had a very difficult or contentious partnership story. 

Lynne: Interestingly, I’d worked with Rachel professionally, so I knew she was efficient. I knew she can write well; I knew she was efficient in the way, she approached her business, she always delivered copy on time. It was always clean, she always invoiced promptly, she was always professional. I had an insight, and I’d worked with her for, two or three years. There are some people who I love who have I’ve commissioned who do great work that I wouldn’t work with because I know that they’re all over the place business wise and not efficient.

I guess I had that insight into her, but I think, when you’ve been doing this as long as we have, and I’ve been doing it for so long, well, Rachel’s been freelancing longer, but I’ve been working longer. I think you have some good self-awareness. I know the things that I’m better at and the things that I need help with, and I think I’m pretty good. I think what I’ve learned over the years as an editor was to accept other people’s strengths and the way that people can work differently, and it still doesn’t matter. 

As we talked about working differently, one of the obvious things is that I’m an early morning person and Rachel’s an evening person. I’m up at six or something and I do a lot of my work then, whereas Rachel does all her deep work late at night and I’ll wake up to things. I don’t judge that, that doesn’t matter, and I think a lot of those things you get with maturity, don’t you think, Rach? 

Rachel: Absolutely. I hadn’t thought about that. We work at totally opposite ends of the day in order to get everything done, but also on a personality type mix. I’m a real overthinker and Lynne is not. You’re very much a, get things done. I think having her as a business partner and a friend has really been brilliant because she’s a very calm and comforting person to have in your corner and has this very calm way of navigating the world, whereas I can catastrophise sometimes, but also, I’ve learnt so much from her about business.

It’s been a really educational partnership for me as well. I’m not sure she gets as much out of the deal as I do, but it’s been so nice becoming friends as well as business partners. Because we have to be really honest with each other about everything you do. 

If she wants to put a guest on that I don’t agree with, sometimes I don’t think that’s right for the podcast or our audience and we have to be really respectful of why we want that person, or the different kinds of decisions that you have to make. You’ve got to be really honest and often there’s a bit of give and take. There have definitely been some no’s that we’ve both put out there, but we’ve never actually had any argy-bargy, I suppose.

Lynne: No. Argy-bargy, that’s such an Australian term!

Rachel: There have been a couple of moments where we have had disagreements, I remember.

Austin: I think to be expected. 

Lynne: Totally. When Rach talks about that she’s probably more dramatic than I am, that’s probably a good thing that sometimes I just will plow on regardless and not necessarily think about how people would appeal. Writers are a sensitive bunch and Rachel’s more sensitive than I am, and then she gives me a good insight into how it could be perceived. 

Certainly, in terms of tone, the things that I’m much more straighty-180 as a writer, particularly in business type things, whereas Rachel’s got a lot more personality and, chattiness in her writing. I’ve had to stretch myself because I do recognise that her way of writing connects with an audience better, and particularly our audience. 

Austin: I want to call out several things that I think are really important and valuable to people who are thinking about partnership.

Self-awareness goes a long way. With that comes the recognition of your own weaknesses and other people’s strengths. You used the word maturity, and I think that is like a really robust and multifaceted word. I think you could also use the word character because when you were talking about Rachel, Lynne, you said that she met deadlines, and I think that partnerships are just easier if you have a really deep respect for each other. 

We talk about trust, but what that means is ultimately, I believe that you’re going to do what you said you were going to do, and it becomes really difficult to do just about anything if, I don’t know if in university you all had to do the group project where some people just didn’t pull their weight? So, I just wanted to pull those things out because all those character and personality traits, and I’ll also say values because I think a value for respecting other people, is important, but it’s also a counterpart to chemistry. 

Chemistry is, do I enjoy spending time with this person? Do we have some similar interests? Do we enjoy talking about the same things? You can get all that and have a really bad collaboration. You need to anchor the chemistry against some of those complementary character and personality traits and values.

I want you all to hit rapid fire, any good surprises or benefits that have come from partnership, and then we will also do challenges and frustrations. If you want to, we can also strike that from the record. 

Rachel: Do you want to start Lynne? 

Lynne: No, you start this time. 

Rachel:  Okay. Alright. I think there’s been so many benefits. That’s the really interesting thing in a partnership that doesn’t really make you money personally, but has had enormous benefit over your career and, as much as I find the term a little bit wanky, your personal brand. I think the podcast and the summit has really raised our profiles.

It’s catapulted us to another level of visibility, but often I don’t even realise how many people listen to it or who’s listening. I think it’s been really good for Rachel’s List because the podcast and the summit have been natural pathways to membership for a lot of writers out there who weren’t aware.

On a personal note, the back links from the podcast have been spectacularly good for my SEO. It brings a lot of SEO juice. I will take that! I think also the conference, it was something we weren’t really expecting. You know, we were sitting on a plane, we thought, let’s do it. We could do this, and we just went for it. 

It was absolutely nuts. That first one we decided we’re going to go big or go home. Invite, not just Ed Gandia and Jennifer Goforth Gregory to be our keynotes and fly them in and the buzz from that event and also from the following year’s event with you, Austin, on stage, it was like nothing we’d ever experienced.

The knock-on effect from that has been huge. The visibility, the learnings, what we’ve learned, the fun, the connections, the networking and all the stuff that’s come out of that. There’s been masterminds and books published and people connecting in ways that we never expected, so huge benefits, I think.

Lynne: For me too. I mean, it’s great, I feel that same thing. Rachel had a higher profile and probably still does than I do within the freelance community. It certainly raised my profile. I also think that working so closely with somebody, you end up trying new things that you never would have.

Certainly, Rachel does a lot more copy copywriting than I do. We are now doing a newsletter for the podcast, which I hadn’t really done a newsletter and of course with Rachel’s List, she’s got a really good newsletter program that she uses. She’s got it set up well. I’ve managed to do that newsletter starting from a much stronger position.

We have pitched on projects together with complementary skills, which has been interesting. I’ve learned so much about podcasting. I’ve done some corporate podcasts for some of my clients, so that’s been an extra skill. I’ve made all the mistakes in our own podcasts, and I’ve been able to bring those skills. I’ve now got a really good audio editor; I’ve got a really good marketing person to bring when I pitch that to clients. That’s been good. 

I’ve pitched myself to editors that have appeared on the podcast that I’ve ended up getting work from and connected with people. As Rachel said, the summit was great. We got the sort of speakers we wanted to hear and that was really good.

I think it’s just been a whole learning curve, but I do think I’m doing a lot more. We’ve had guests on that specialise in quizzes and things and I’ve thought, oh my God, I never even knew that! Now I could use that person to do a quiz for one of my clients. Those connections, even little things like that have been great.

Austin: You all have both said friendship, but I think that’s kind of the sweetness in a partnership is you get a friendship and ultimately that’s also what you want to protect. Hey, let’s still be friends at the end of this, but also the idea that a partnership just sort of compounds friendships because it grows your network. I just love that idea. Were there any challenges? 

Lynne: One of the joys of working with Rachel is that we are both really successful as freelance writers. We are really busy, we are juggling things, we’re both got businesses, we’re both in a higher level. We are not looking for work, it’s trying to fit things in. Sometimes it’s more the time. We’ve got busy calendars and when we compound that, I book most of the guests. Compounding our calendars with a busy guest calendar, that’s a real challenge and sometimes it’s exhausting. I might spend a lot of time doing that, and particularly when they’re in different time zones around the world, that’s a challenge. 

I think the challenge for me is sometimes making sure that I’m comfortable with that super chatty tone Rachel has, but that’s something that’s good for me, to get myself out of my comfort zone. That’s probably the biggest challenge and also now I’m pretty good, and Rachel will I hate this, but I don’t answer her texts after like eight or nine o’clock at night because I’m really stupid at that point and I don’t expect her to answer my early morning texts. That’s where we’ve got to with that.

Rachel: I want to come at this a little bit different because the challenges to me, all of that is very true. If your partnership is a podcast and its weekly, it is really difficult. It’s a hungry beast. It is such a commitment and there’s so much involved. So, I don’t want to say to someone, go do this, but you know, unless they’re really aware of what’s involved.

I guess I want to move from challenges to frustrations because there are things that I wish we’d done in the beginning that I didn’t consider. You know, you learn as you go. A podcast or any partnership, any business partnership is one of those things where systems and processes really matter enormously, but you learn as you go. 

For example, some of the people listening may be aware of Kim Kerton, who does a brilliant podcast called Unemployed and Afraid. She talked to me once about dropping specific code into your episodes so that if you sold ads, you could make them pop up throughout your back catalogue just seamlessly. I thought that is such a brilliant idea, and it’s not something that I even knew about. It’s not something most people would know about. You know, it’s just so clever. 

I also really wish, something that frustrates me that we’d been really militant about tagging our episodes with keywords or phrases in a spreadsheet, so it was easier to find things and to repurpose bits of audio or content for blogs and newsletters. When you learn about doing that and you’re 200 episodes in, it’s a real face palm moment. So, for me, the big frustrations are that we have so much great content, but less time and money to actually repurpose it.

That is a huge frustration for me and an ongoing challenge for us, but something that we do talk about, because you know, we’ve talked about writing a book, we’ve talked about, actually having a proper blog schedule and all of that. It’s just a case of time and money really. But those are really important things to think about.

Lynne: This is a great illustration of how Rachel overthinks things a lot and I just go with it and ignore it because I don’t have the time to do what she’s suggesting. So I go, uh that’s fine, whereas Rachel is going, oh, all these things we could do and I’m just going, oh, look, we don’t have the time. Let’s move on. 

Rachel: Let’s just get on with it. 

Austin: Let’s go for it and I do think it’s possible to optimise a process that doesn’t yet exist, which is the same as just not acting. You can think yourself into a kind of paralysis, right? But I think both of you just shared excellent observations, and the one that stuck out to me was, if you try to perfect a partnership first, then you’d never get started. You could bring perfectionism into a partnership. It sounds like it really helps to have one person like Lynne, who’s like, let’s just try it and we will see how it goes and maybe we can perfect it later.

Lynne: Rachel always makes it better. Otherwise, we’d probably still be doing, not quite as good. She’s always pushing me to be better. So that’s good. 

Rachel: I think you are the driver of us doing things like the summit. I said, no way, I’m running two business, now we’ve got a podcast, there’s no way we can do a conference. And she went, it’s the next natural progression. We have to do it. We have to try! 

Austin: You’ve done it not once, but twice. She is very persuasive! 

Would you all give some advice to more advanced freelance writers who maybe are thinking, I could start an agency with this person that I like, I should collaborate on a podcast or a book or an event with somebody that I like. We all have these opportunities to partner.

What would you both say specifically to writers? And I know writers can be different, but what advice would you give? 

Lynne: I think start small, is always a thing. I think the fact that Rachel and I had had a professional relationship was good and we understood each other and some mutual respect. I would never suggest starting a big project. 

I’d do a little project or a stage project because it is about how you work together. I think that’s probably the main thing I’d say, but also you have to relax and let other people work in a different way to you. I think that’s the hardest thing, particularly for freelancers who’ve worked by themselves. You work a way that works for you and that suits your preferences. You’ve got to accept that other people work differently. 

Rachel: I think it’s important to start small and to have realistic goals, but I also think you want to know what is the outcome or the return on investment that we’re seeking from doing this? Or what are the tangible results that we want to see and what is the timeline for seeing those results? We really had fixed ROIs for the conference particularly, and so you really have to nail all those down and be on the same page. 

I also think if you are starting something with someone, I’m going to go back to my favourite topic, you really need to think about your systems and processes in the early stages. To automate aspects of the job and ensure content is able to be repurposed and I really think probably some of the best money you’ll ever spend is to consult with an automation expert in the beginning, so you can start as you mean to go on.

I think it will save you an enormous amount of time and money doing that. Choose your partner really, really carefully because you have to trust each other. You’ve got to both know and trust that the other person will bring 50% to the partnership. Because there are going to be days where you’re tired, you’re on deadline, you’re just not feeling it. You just basically wanting chuck it all in the air and not do it anymore and the other person will naturally have to jump in and be the one who drives you forward, and you are constantly flipping between those roles if you are really busy people. So, I think that’s, that’s really important.

I also think if the partnership you’re thinking of is a podcast, I wouldn’t get really hung up on metrics, but I would use them, to tweak and guide your content because ultimately, you’re always putting your audience first and thinking about how will this guest, or how will this idea serve them? And so, metrics are really useful for growth and creating content or a product or whatever it is that really serves your audience. 

Lynne: I also think all of everything with businesses, podcasts particularly, it’s evolved. Podcasts are in such a different place than when we started six years ago. We couldn’t have possibly predicted everything. Some of this, you do just have to start, but you have to be prepared to say, this isn’t working. We should do more of this, and less of that and that’s the same with any business really. 

As a freelance business, you’ve got to say, actually the market’s changing and the pandemic gave us lots of opportunities. It also gave us lots of restrictions, but in the end, it was a good thing for the podcast. So, you’ve got to be prepared to change your business model. That’s the same with anything really. Rachel’s List is a whole different game from when you started it, and I think that’s the same with both our businesses.

Rachel: Yeah, you’ve got to be prepared to take risks, I guess. 

Austin: That’s good. That word, we avoid it and yet that’s a fundamental part of any new venture, including a partnership, is risk. I want to just circle something that you said, which was you’re both very established and successful in your respective freelance careers and just from my perspective, I think that contributed to the success of your partnership because I’ve had some partnerships fall apart because one or the other partner put pressure on the partnership to either generate revenue, maybe before it was ready or needed to take cash out of the business when the cash probably needed to stay in the business. 

But there were some, what ended up being catastrophic, differences in motivation. And so, the fact that you, neither one of you is dependent upon the partnership to pay your bills and even you could put money into the partnership at critical times to keep the podcast going. I think that contributed to the longevity of your partnership. 

Lynne: Oh, for sure.

Rachel: Money changes everything. 

Lynne: Also, when you’ve been running a business for a long time, you are more aware of some of those things. You’re not as idealistic, you’re a bit more practical.

We had already good systems, we had good invoicing systems. If you did this straight from the beginning, our financial systems were well set up. We knew what we were doing, and we did have money in the bank, but I mean, obviously we don’t want to lose money, but we knew our stuff.

Austin: Which means that almost any new project or venture you take on, it’s that much more likely to be successful because it’s built on that business foundation. 

I want to end well, I’m going to ask you where people can find you online of course, and of course where they can go listen to the podcast because it’s a really good one, but let’s end with one ‘definitely don’t’ from each of you related to partnerships. So, if you are interested in forming a partnership, ‘definitely don’t’ fill in the blank. 

Lynne: I would say I would never have a partnership with somebody who is really negative and who grumbles about, particularly people. You know what it’s like in freelance world, there’s people that grumble about not enough clients or this person over there.

I would never do that because I think all that negative energy is just not helpful. Rachel’s always positive and I think that’s really important. It’s a bit more what we can do, not what we can’t. 

Austin: Good one.

Rachel: I think for me, given my life, don’t choose a partnership that has a workload baked into it that’s going to lead to burnout, which is really what we’re all here to talk about.

I think it’s really important to figure out what’s doable. It’s really important to figure out who will do what, because there’s a lot of repetitive grunt work in a partnership. It becomes really clear, really quickly who’s not pulling their weight. You want to go into it like we talked about before, in choosing wisely who you want to partner with because you both want to bring 50% of it. I think we got really lucky in that we have some different skills. It’s really split quite evenly, and we really do what we gravitate towards, what we’re good at, and it somehow works, but there’s so much that can go wrong, so it’s really important to choose that person wisely and to both be on the same page about all of those things.

Austin: Great answers. Wow! I would like to hear like, just give me the links and the websites and that’s for you as individuals, and that’s for all the stuff you do together. There’s a lot of them. 

Lynne: There are where we do a lot of things. My website is www.lynnetestoni.com. That’s just mine and I have the podcast is on a separate tab. Our podcast website is www.thecontentbyte.com. 

Rachel: Rachel’s List is www.rachelslist.com.au. That’s the jobs board and membership that I run and then my personal www.rachelsmith.com.au.

Austin: Right on. Well, my friends, thank you for talking candidly. I just so enjoy spending time with you both and appreciate you sharing your wisdom. I’m very glad that this partnership is healthy because everybody benefits from the podcast and the events and your work together so, here’s to six more years!

Lynne: Yes, thank you, Austin! It’s been a joy.

Rachel: Yeah, thank you very much!

Austin: I’ll talk to you soon. Bye!

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Credits:

Connect with Austin L. Church through his Freelance Cake website: https://www.freelancecake.com/

And his community at: https://www.freelancecake.com/community

Find Lynne www.lynnetestoni.com 

Find Rachel www.rachelsmith.com.au 

Rachel’s List www.rachelslist.com.au 

If you have questions you’d like us to answer in our next Q&A episode, just send them here.

Thanks (as always) to our sponsors Rounded (www.rounded.com.au), an easy invoicing and accounting solution that helps freelancers run their businesses with confidence. Looking to take advantage of the discount for Rachel’s List Gold Members? Email us at: hello@rachelslist.com.au for the details.

Episode edited by Marker Creative Co www.markercreative.co