The systems freelancers need to succeed – with Leticia Mooney

Leticia Mooney: When your customer experience works, your sales and your finance systems are all working in harmony, then the experience of your customers from discovery onwards is luxurious. Your sales process demonstrates leadership. You rarely have to chase a payment. Things just work.

Rachel: 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: 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.

So, Rach, we are talking about something that I love that leaves some freelancers – you said yawning, but I think it’s more about scared and intimidated, I reckon. Systems.

Rachel: All three.

Lynne: Or all three. How much do you love systems and processes?

Rachel: I love them a lot – now. But that’s because I spent many years without any or without good ones and when you have them, you realise how much you’re not reinventing the wheel, how much easier it is to do the work you do and bring clients in the door and all of that stuff. I’m a fan now, but I do know that it’s easy to yawn over systems, so we are going to nerd out for anyone listening.

Lynne: I think it’s good. I think it’s good because really if you have good systems, it actually frees you up to do the fun stuff, I think.

Rachel: Yes, that’s good. The make money stuff.

Lynne: And the creative stuff, which is important. We are talking to Leticia Mooney today and she coaches freelance creatives to build robust businesses supported by systems and architecture and why it’s so important and she told us that freelancers often make the mistake of thinking they don’t need systems. The business is going well, so why mess with what doesn’t seem to be broken? What do you reckon?

Rachel: I know. I think that was probably me for a little while, but I’ve been freelancing for 25 years. But I’ve definitely had points where I thought, I’m so busy, everything’s going well, I don’t really need to put that in place, or I’ll just do that manually, or whatever it is. But I think what I’ve learned over the years is systems helps you create the foundation for your business. I’m really interested to hear Leticia’s point of view. She’s really active on LinkedIn about how to create a solid freelance business. We were just talking a bit off air about her approach, which is slightly, slightly – how would we put it?

Leticia: Brutal?

Rachel: Brutal, brutal. But she’s done a lot. She’s authored six books. She’s built and sold a magazine, and she’s turned $1,200 and four weeks into a business that is spanning a decade. I think this is going to be a really fun conversation and there’ll be lots of great tips and strategies that you can action.

Lynne: I agree. I’m really excited. So, let’s get her into the hot seat. Welcome Leticia.

Leticia: You know, it sounds really impressive when someone says what you’ve done like that.

Rachel: Yes.

Leticia: Thank you, ladies. I’m happy to be here.

Rachel: Having your bio read out is a weird and surreal moment. But it’s good. You’ve done a lot and thank you so much for coming on. As I mentioned, I am a fan of the LinkedIn tough love that you dole out to freelancers. What is the biggest mistake freelancers make when it comes to systems and processes?

Leticia: Gosh, tough love. I have to be careful. I don’t turn into a stonehearted general, Rachel.

The biggest mistake I see, especially among writers is they think nobody else can do what they do. So, they don’t take the time to examine their work because writing isn’t just writing – its analysis, it’s problem solving, its research, it’s writing, it’s editing, it’s delivering. It’s all of those parts and the writing part, whatever your technical skill is, that part is actually a minuscule part of the total work and processes and systems touch the whole beast. So, what they don’t do is sit down and really look at how does this function, because it’s not getting a brief and just writing.

Lynne: There is a lot to it. I think over time. But also, because I’ve been in freelance for over ten years and I think maybe you set up systems when everything goes wrong once, and you go, I guess that’s what I’ve done. And I don’t know. I think Rachel, you’re the same, that you know, it takes one big fuck up and then you go, oh, I should’ve done that. Oh, that would be, you forget a story, or you miss a deadline or something, and then you set up a better process.

Rachel: Or you add a clause to your contract because something went wrong and you didn’t, you weren’t covered in a certain way. Like remember we had Nikita Morell on who talked about adding the pause clause in for people that just stopped dead in the middle of a project. And then…

Lynne: Started ghosting you.

Rachel: Or they don’t, or they just say, oh, sorry, I just have to pause or delay this for a couple of months. But then when you get back to the project, you have to dive back in and revisit everything that you did and why you made those decisions. And so, it was about charging a fee for that time.

Leticia: And truly I think that’s where policies come from, you know? That’s where all policy comes from. It doesn’t matter what business you’re in, it’s like, oh, we worked with this type of business, and it was a disaster the first time, but we trusted it and did it two or three more times. It was always a disaster. So, we’re just not going to do that now and we write it down.

Lynne: Exactly.

Leticia: So, to a large extent that’s true. 

Lynne: You’ve talked about how freelancers need to set up an engine room for their business, with systems spread into three sections, like customer experience, sales and finance. If you have all these in place, what does it mean for your business?

Leticia: If you talk to different people, you get a different sense of what the engine room is. 

So, sales coaches will speak exclusively about acquisition, for example, because cash is lifeblood, right? But to follow an analogy like that, cash is red blood cells and the piece that we forget to compliment that might be the white blood cells. That might be the customer service, for example, the relationships, and together they make up the lifeblood of your business because it’s all about relationships. So, when your customer experience works, your sales and your finance systems are all working in harmony, then the experience of your customers from discovery onwards is luxurious. Your sales process demonstrates leadership. You rarely have to chase a payment. Things just work. So, we could call it lots of things, but really, it’s a business you love to work in because the problems don’t appear very often because you mitigated a lot of that risk.

Rachel: Okay. I love that.

Let’s dive a little bit deeper into these three sections. So, let’s start with customer experience as our first sort of systems bundle, I guess. So, say a new client comes on board, what is the non-negotiable system every freelancer needs to have in place from day one?

Leticia: I thought about this a lot because customer experience is really my bag. I could talk about it all day long and probably everyone would expect me to give you a tactical point in terms of what they could deploy in a specific way today. But what I’m going to do is I’m going to zoom out from the micro up to the meta view for a minute, and I’m going to suggest that the system that everybody needs from day one, like it’s what you can do on your first day in business, doesn’t matter what you’re doing, is what is known as a PDCA cycle, and that comes from ISO 9001, which is a Quality Management Systems standard, developed by the International Organisation for Standardisation, and it stands for Plan-Do-Check-Act. So, when you have a system like that, everything you do is planned and intentional, you know what you’re doing because you keep documentation or measurement about every little thing.

You check it perhaps weekly. Freelance business is a fast-moving business, so a weekly review is absolutely reasonable rather than doing it quarterly, for example, where things have just moved too fast. Then you act on what you discovered by planning the change. So, whatever your customer experience is when you start, it will get incrementally better really quickly.

Let’s say that you planned a certain email sequence. You deploy it, that’s the doing. You check how it performed and if it didn’t work the way you wanted to, you got complaints or people didn’t understand what you were doing or they came back with questions, then you act on that by saying, what do we do then to mitigate that for the next run?

So, the PDCA cycle is probably the gem. It’s a diamond that one?

Lynne: That sounds good. I like that. So, I have a system. What sort of system do you use to see a smooth client journey? How do you work that through going through that? Is it PDCA?

Leticia: P-D-C-A.

Lynne: How does that work for you in practice?

Leticia: I’ll give you an example that I tell everybody because it’s one of my favourite examples. A few years ago – actually, it’s more than a few years ago now, but anyway, it’s in my writing business. I had a client who put every thought she had in an email, and she would do it all day long, and so she would send me emails like, we could do this, we could do this, we could do this.

She had notebooks and stuff and at her end, she was in a professional services firm, so it was wildly different sort of business. And what I was doing was responding to emails, all that all day, and she was writing emails all day. And at some point, I just thought, this is really unsustainable. What’s driving it?

And so, a really smooth client journey leaves your clients without questions, barriers, resentment, fear, anxiety, complaints, ghosting – all those things because there’s no question about what next, when is something going to be delivered. They’re led through everything with absolute certainty.

So, with that particular person, I did some thinking and I thought that behaviour is really driven by fear. She doesn’t know what’s next, so she’s grasping and throwing out whatever she can think of. So, I ran a test and on the next Monday I sent an email called the Plan for the Week because I was working with them a lot and I said, here’s what’s on the desk this week. This is what’s going to be delivered and when if you have any questions or you want to change this for this week, call me by ten o’clock. And I sent it really early and all of the emails just stopped and I thought, oh gosh.

Lynne: Oh, that’s wonderful.

Leticia: So, I deployed it for my entire client roster and same thing. I never got emails about any of that stuff because they just felt safe.

In a broader sense, a prospect is through discovery and into a solution call when you want them to. They pay something before the end of that sales call, maybe a deposit, or really soon after. There are no issues with project briefs because they’re fully clarified and reversed briefed, and they’re not just clarified.

They’re also the basis of your agreement. So, the deliverables are inside your client agreement, and all of the clauses pertain to that from your intellectual property to whatever else. They never have a question about when or how, because you preempt all of it. And you know, at the end of the day, that’s what makes them come back because nobody else can match a service like that, or very few people will go to that extent to make them feel safe.

So that’s a smooth client journey is a safe one for them and it sounds like a lot of work for us.

Lynne: It’s way less than dealing with thousands of emails.

Leticia: Way less. And when they get it back from you, then they can say, oh, well that’s great because that matches what I was thinking because they’re not tracking what they’re thinking a lot of the time anyway.

Rachel: Right. So, I just want to go into this a bit more. Say, we are talking about your onboarding process where you send, the contract and here’s how it, and is it a document that says here’s how we work together, or here’s how I work, which outlines a lot of that stuff.

Is that what you’d suggest?

Leticia: It depends on who you ask. And I’m going to hedge this a little bit because I have in the past only sent contracts, agreements to people, but I’ve always kind of walked them through it. And these days I walk them through it to the point of agreement on the sales call.

Rachel: Okay.

Leticia: They say yes. We walk through it like this is what it looks like. Here are all of the terms and discuss them at the time, and what that prevents you from doing is sending a proposal with an agreement attached, and then people reading it in isolation and then having questions and then going away.

Rachel: Ghosting.

Leticia: They just ghost you and they might not even do it intentionally, but it’s overwhelming sometimes particularly if you have IP clauses. You can use this in this territory, but not this one. You can reproduce it here, but not there in these ways. Here’s when you have to pay more money for this and these are the payment terms, and if you don’t pay, then I’m going to turn into a bank and, all of that stuff, which in the fine print, and a lot of people will just see the fine print and run. Some will sign and just be done, but if you walk through it with them, then you can answer all of the questions at the time. If any clauses, then they say, well, in our business we have to do it this way. Then you can have that conversation while they’re hot rather than later on and then waste more of their time.

Rachel: That’s a really interesting way to do it. Hasn’t wouldn’t have occurred to me to do that, but I can see why that would work. You know, you’re sort of like leading them down the path towards converting and paying the deposit and all of that. I like that.

Leticia: Sometimes you can get payment before they sign anything too. Especially if they’re booking work forwards. They pay a deposit today to guarantee that your availability will be where it is. And they know they want you, and they’ve said yes to everything and have no more barriers. Then you can say, after that, here’s the payment link – you go pay that now. Here’s what the agreement looks like, blah, la la la la.

It doesn’t have to be a detailed conversation over a table like you would with a corporate lawyer. I think raising the critical points, especially if you’ve done it before, because once you have people that ask questions, you can mitigate those ahead of time.

Lynne: Makes sense.

Rachel: Is there anything that you see freelancers, do they drop the ball on onboarding or delivering the project that really damages the client experience?

Leticia: When we were speaking off air, we were talking about delivering jobs on time and those sorts of things. That’s a really important one, and it’s a really obvious one, but ultimately, it’s making the client feel safe. So anytime a client asks you for an update, that’s a red flag. It means that an update request isn’t a benign request. It’s a sign that there are issues of anxiety underneath.

And often that comes back to did I spend my money with the right person? So that’s why your communication has to be top priority with your clientele. And, if you have a job spanning more than a week, then like my Monday morning updates, maybe you need to send them an update first thing in whatever cycle you decide is feasible, might be weekly or fortnightly or monthly or whatever.

It supports intentional relationships and it builds anticipation doing that. People come to me often with questions about why am I getting these people asking me for updates all the time? Because you haven’t led them through that process enough, or you haven’t been present enough for them.

But then in delivering the project, what happens? We have feast or famine, and we have floods of work. And if you haven’t paid attention to your project management and how you handle that then suddenly you’re working sixteen hour days and you’ve lost your weekend, and that wears you out. But also, then your work quality isn’t great. So that impacts the client’s experience in all of those places.

Rachel: I think that’s true because then you might forget to ask for a testimonial or you might forget to do the offboarding survey or something like that, just because you’re busy to go onto the next project. So, all of that absolutely is really important.

It’s funny with the updates. I was feeling a bit guilty because I do get those questions sometimes and I realise my updates are very ad hoc. Do you think it’s like social media, when you’re consistent with your updates or you have a really consistent – I update everybody on a Friday afternoon, this is what’s happening, this is what we’ve got to this week, and this is what’s happening next week. It just can calm the client down and leave you free to just do your stuff without.

Leticia: Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, and sometimes we’re really good at doing that in public and we’re not so good at doing that in private. Especially if you’ve got a good relationship with your client, you kind of assume you don’t really need to and that assumption can be damaging because you always need to even when it feels unnecessary.

Lynne: Interesting. One of the things I juggle and Rachel and I are both long-term freelancers. We’re always juggling multiple projects at once, and I might be juggling something simple like a blog post with a whole new like website rewrite or a big project, like editing a book or something.

So, what systems or tools do you use to keep everything on track?

Leticia: That’s a really big question, isn’t it? You know?

I wrote a book called Project Management for Creatives, because I went through that fire and it was hard, and when you don’t, if you haven’t had any formal learning about project management, which most freelance writers, for example, who never have, I went through a university, I was a professional writer by trade, by training. I don’t recall ever once being taught this kind of business smarts in that program. So, there are a bunch of suggestions in that book. But because every project management tool is built on project management 101, which is really, how all of the projects are mapped together and what all the parts look like and how to use Gantt charts and this huge level of complexity, which you see when you go looking for software to help you.

Because if you don’t have the ideas about what to do, you assume the software is going to lead you through it sometimes. But my favourite tools actually were built by my dad, and my dad was a systems guy, so he was a quality assurance consultant and a risk manager and the project risk tool is something he banged on to me about for years, and I ignored right until I used it and then when I used it, I went, man, this is amazing because it, it surfaces everything including social risk. If I drop the ball on this project, what is the social risk? How might my reputation be tarnished by them talking about me? And those sorts of things. But actually, all of these little systems are really useful, but really the primary one and the easiest one for anyone to do is a weekly review preview, and I’m a big fan of Sharran Srivatsaa, who is a real estate coach guy in the States, and he’s a billionaire and he talks in really practical terms about this stuff because he’s worked through it too. But weekly review preview, it kind of goes like this – where have you come this week? What worked, what didn’t work? What’s up this week and what do you have to prepare for? And it works at a meta level and a micro daily level and for those of your listeners who know Agile Methodology, that review preview is really at the heart of Agile because it says what do we need to prepare and who hasn’t anticipated things and where does it fit in the velocity of the work?

So that review preview, weekly and monthly is critical, not just for projects, but also for your business. But at this really smallest level, a spreadsheet or a Kanban that tracks deliverables and where you are in each one, updated every time you work on the project with notes to yourself about that, the keeping journals is really critical to make that happen. And that’s why I’m such a fan of docs as code for journal notes because you can keep it in the repository. But at the top end, any project management tool does the trick. But you just have to be careful about using them intentionally and mindfully.

Reviewing and previewing what’s coming up so that then you can shift your scheduling as and when you need to. And that level of flexibility is what we love about freelancing and also sometimes what we hate about it. One of the pieces of the review preview that’s really valuable I find is it gives you then the ability to say no.

So, if you do your review preview Sunday night. Some people do. Some people do it Friday. If you know what’s coming up, and then someone calls you and says, hey, I need you to do X, Y, Z, or do this change – you can legitimately say, I’m really sorry. I don’t have capacity today or tomorrow, but here’s when I can do that for you. Or here’s who’s someone else who can do this piece of it, which safeguards your time.

Lynne:  I think one thing somebody told me is the best system is the one you use.

Leticia: Amen.

Lynne: I think that’s true. Sometimes people offer going out for a new piece of tech or a new system that will solve all their problems, and it’s not really that it can be any of these systems, just one that suits you and that one that you go, yeah, I could do that.

Leticia: No sticky notes on a wall, man and a pen and a notebook. They do the same thing.

Rachel: They do. Well, we created a project tracker. The project tracker I used to use before I moved on to Moxie because I just wanted the lead gen stuff that was built into that. But the project tracker that we created is really simple, like you were saying, do something super simple.

It’s literally the project where it came from, the status you’re at with the, has it been completed and paid for? Have you asked for a testimonial? And then all of it goes into these little graphs. And I just love it because it’s basic, but yes, you can see at a glance where everything is in your workflow and it’s a beautiful thing.

Leticia: Yes, I’ve got a project health dashboard, which is a bit like that too, and that’s another one my dad built but it effectively says, here are all of the parts of the project. Have all of these things been done?

Rachel: Yes.

Leticia: And then it gives you charts and ratings about how healthy it is.

Rachel: Wow.

Leticia: If you haven’t got the deliverables in, or people aren’t participating, or the risk part hasn’t been done, whatever it is, it will show you immediately where it all is.

Rachel: Well, okay, we’re going to move on. We could talk about project management all day, but we’re going to move on to our next systems bundle, which is sales and so this includes lead gen marketing, all the lovely stuff that helps us make money. And I want to touch on word of mouth because I think that this year in particular, and maybe last year, freelancers who use that as their main marketing system have really felt like it’s not working like it did anymore. All the systems they used to use to bring in work or get work are just not working anymore. So, where does word of mouth fall short, do you think?

Leticia: I think part of it is in failing to get the testimonials. I think word of mouth is really powerful when you leverage it and that comes down to capturing and using testimonials yourself rather than waiting for other people to do it, because a lot of the time they won’t. Or people are too busy and they don’t go out and interface with other people. So, word of mouth really relies on them knowing exactly what you did for them and how you did it and what results they got, and then them having the conversations with the right people to know how to talk about you. And there’s a lot of stuff you just way out of your control.

I love word of mouth too, and it’s great, but I find that a direct referral is better than something that really is fudgy, like word of mouth is quite fudgy. How’d you find me ah, heard about you from somewhere as opposed to this woman told me you did this amazing job and I want that. That’s a difference between word of mouth and a referral. I think that’s partly why and how it can work better is to ask for the referrals.

Build a referral program. Whatever it looks like. Any referral program is probably better than none.

Lynne:  Interesting.

Rachel: I think it’s hard to ask, isn’t it like to say to clients, is there anyone else that you know that might need my services? But that’s where it starts.

Leticia: That’s where it starts. And even just telling them that you have a referral program, like maybe you give them that, maybe there’s a percentage rate of a gift that you give for every referral, whether you’ve worked with that person or not. Some people are motivated by money, and some people are motivated by gifts, and some people just like being recognised.

Sometimes, you could put it in your newsletter. I got referrals from these people. Thank you very much. And that really ticks a box for some people.

Rachel: That’s true. That’s a really nice thing to do. I hadn’t thought to do that, but that’s great to put a thank you in your newsletter.

Leticia:  Because you’re public, that way it also shows you as being gracious and like, at the end of the day, we’re all about working with nice people that we like. It builds trust.

Rachel: It makes other clients think, oh, I could refer, it gives them a nudge to refer you. So, it keeps building it.

Lynne: So, to drill down into that lead generation system, what’s a good way to get something that’s simple and repeatable in practice?

Leticia: I think simple and repeatable is tricky, isn’t it? Because it really depends on how well you know your market and what your outreach looks like to people. I think at its simplest, it means templating your outreach messages to people and the critical points of that and then tracking how it performs. It’s having a detailed spreadsheet or, or like we were saying, you know, a pen and a notebook that gives you enough data to understand what you’re doing and what’s working or isn’t working.

If you want outreach to move into a discovery call, and we know that discovery is not a sales call, right? It’s a conversation, you want to do that within 72 hours if you can. And then to have your solution call within 72 hours of that and then to book the kick-off as close to that as you can because you capitalise on the momentum and beyond that. Your loss rate will be higher anyway, and the data will show you that.

So, you keep notes every time and that also comes back to a P-D-C-A, doesn’t it? You have your data; you review what you’re doing. So, a great system will track that stuff. It will track things like no shows too. You book a call, did they show up? Were they available? If not, why not? If you get to the end of the process and you’re selling to someone who needs, suddenly goes, oh my husband, because they’re in a family business, needs to approve the finance and they’re not going to say yes to you, then that’s something you couldn’t have asked in the discovery too.

So, it feeds back into itself. So really the simplest is, is an outreach system, whether you’re in DM’s or you’re texting people, or you’re calling them, or you’re emailing them, whatever it is, a discovery solution, call pairing and an onboarding system that is totally templated and you have the templates all the way through, so, copy paste the whole time with a bit of a tweak.

The other benefit of that, which I think we often don’t acknowledge enough to ourselves, is that when it’s in a template, it’s not them picking me up necessarily. It’s here’s a known offer and I’m offering this to people in this particular way, and I can run the system. And that way it’s not my feeling whatever the value point is of my own self-esteem every time. So, you just do it. You can pick it up and you just do it?

Rachel: It’s just part of the system that happens. You’re not rewriting and overthinking all the time.

Leticia: All the time.

Rachel: Okay. Well, let’s touch on marketing. How often do you need to be doing it, and how can you make the process work for you? If it’s something you hate doing, which a lot of freelancers do.

Leticia: Yes. I think you have to do it all the time. We’re freelancers and we’re technicians and we like doing the technical work, but really, we’re not. We’re business owners and in a freelance business, we wear all the hats, most of us.

So, you do have to do it all the time. I’ve had clients who’ve come to me at ten years into their business and they’re wondering why their business isn’t going like it was in its second year, but it’s because they stopped doing all that marketing.

So, what do you need to do? That’s the million-dollar question, Rachel. I think there are influencers everywhere that will tell you what to do. Most of them have a program to sell you on as a result of it.

Lynne: It’s funny that.

Leticia: But I mean, at the very least, you want to be visible. So, I like email newsletters because they capture people and they bring them into your ecosystem and you’ve got them, you can be de-platformed from everywhere, but if you have an email list, you have an email list, and direct mail is really valuable.

But also, being in front of people. Right? I feel like, for example, I have an example of a person who is a writer and an artist and there’s a lot of artists and people who buy art, who use LinkedIn for that purpose. But she can’t use it because it triggers her ADHD, like poison, it’s poison to her. She loses her brain. So, she had to find another way. And for her the solution was Substack notes. Function. It brings the two worlds together, functions in substantially the same way. So, you really need to find something that works for you, and how you function and for where your people are and find a way that works with your timing.

Writers love to write, but we often hate doing slide decks and what are other rubbish we have to do? So, you can use a robot to do that now, isn’t that amazing? But visibility depends on the platform and the algorithm. I find personally commenting on my target markets, LinkedIn posts is an amazing way of getting around a whole lot of tricks in the algorithm and lift your visibility massively.

So, you can do that to demonstrate your capability, and you can, and people will have conversations with you, which is then you having a discovery call in public. It’s an amazing testimonial to do that sort of stuff.

Does that answer the question?

Lynne: I think so.

Rachel: I agree. I think LinkedIn, I try and do maybe, well now maybe two to three posts a week, but what you just mentioned about commenting and engaging, I think I keep hearing how much more powerful that is to actually and not just do a comment like great post and then leave. It’s like a really genuine, real useful comment.

Leticia: Yes.

Rachel: Doing that every single day on different people’s feeds. And someone told me the minute that you do that, then your feed is shown to that person. Whereas before, it’s not so, or maybe not.

Leticia: There are some really powerful people in the world who use the same strategy. Codie Sanchez is one of them, and for ages, she was absent from LinkedIn, so she was probably writing another book or something.

But that’s effectively her strategy on LinkedIn. And so, her team drops in and makes a very tiny but valuable comment that picks up something useful from that person’s post. It works really well.

The other thing I’ve noticed is you can post too much. If you do deep dive stuff all the time, you are just not going to get the visibility. And so, you’ll probably notice this too, Rachel – people are absent from LinkedIn. Their visibility goes up suddenly because the algorithm wants them back on the platform. So, it’s a balance and you really need to track the numbers too.

Lynne: It’s interesting, isn’t it?

Rachel: A lot of tracking. A lot of data.

Leticia: So much data. It’s knowing what to track that matters for your business and that comes back to your system design too.

Lynne: Because I think that freelancers do waste a lot of time or energy doing the wrong things. Do you think that people do that? What sort of mistakes do you see being made?

Leticia: Look, I’ve made all the mistakes, I think.

Lynne: Haven’t we all.

Leticia: I’ve started so many businesses, and I’ve made all the mistakes in every dimension. But one of them is just shouting into the void. People trying to teach other people by just saying stuff that’s disconnected. It doesn’t have a coherence. Each of the posts isn’t related to the previous or the next one. It’s just, what am I thinking about right now and it just loses any sort of coherent impact that it could have. At the very least, link your posts together.

But the other one is that they sit behind a keyboard too much. And there’s a fantastic program that I recommend to everybody listening, everybody, 100 coffees in 30 Days, and that was recommended to me. And that will do more for your business than sitting behind a keyboard and posting every day online because you’re actually out making friends and business is a people business.

Lynne: Real connections. And I think that really matters at the moment with the whole AI thing that, personal connection is really important.

Leticia: Really important. And you know, it sounds like a lot, especially when you’re in a city, having a coffee with someone means you have to travel and you have to park and you have to do all these things. But you can have breakfast on Zoom with someone too, you know?

What was that book? Never Eat Alone.

Lynne: Oh, right. Yes. 

Leticia: You could literally pick that up as a system and run with it.

Lynne:  I do feel that sometimes people also make the mistake of constantly looking for new clients instead of going back to previous clients or, somebody you might have done a great project with two or three years ago and come back to them. They’re always looking for the new ones out there and they’re constantly making cold calls rather than slightly warmer ones. 

Leticia: Or even, Lynne, you can even wind this right back. They don’t, they start working with someone and they don’t make notes about when their children’s birthdays are or when their wedding anniversary is, and they don’t send them cards.

Let’s say you’re working with someone who’s firstborn son is graduating from high school and travel, joined the Navy or something. Right. And they’ve got to travel away to go and do something. If you send a congratulations card that’s going to sit on the mantle piece for the next two months because people don’t get them.

It comes down to that, and the business literature is overflowing with exactly that. This is not new stuff. There was a business, I can’t remember its name now, isn’t that terrible? Should have looked it up in the US, which was a clothing business that started with, twelve pieces of clothing and a pot of coffee bubbling in the back of the store. It smelled really nice, and what they did was they tracked the minuscule data on every single conversation. They had a database in the 1970s, which kept all of that information. So, every time someone contacted them, they were like, oh yeah, last time you were talking about this, is this still useful? And people feel valued, and so it’s the little moments. The little moments matter. You’re right. And because that money on the table, Lynne, from all those existing people that you’ve worked with. It’s a giant pile compared to what’s the new money that’s coming in.

Rachel: And how much harder it will be to get that new money in.

Lynne: And even to write or to do the project. I mean, it’s so much easier to work with somebody whose business you already know.

Leticia: Yes. And who already knows how you work.

Rachel: You don’t have to set them up all the time.

Lynne: Makes sense.

Rachel: Well, speaking of money, let’s move on to our last set of systems, which is finance. The money you make and spend and how you create that stable cash flow. What financial systems do you need right from the start?

Leticia: You need to have a percentage system that controls every dollar that comes in.  So, that is really, that’s the system that is the game changer and I’ll tell you something – in my first year of my last business, I did that from day one.

So, I had a profit percentage from day one. I had 30% of every dollar was the tax mans didn’t matter. The actual, if your tax rate is 24%, we’re splitting hairs, make it 30% because then you’ll have a cushion. 30% of your business is an operational cost and if it’s higher than that, you’re probably bleeding and need to bring it down. And then, so you have this minuscule amount really, that is your wage and that changes your approach to money. The Profit First System by Mike Michalowicz is a game changer too.

Lynne: Lot of people talk about that.

Leticia: Mike is an amazing dude and that system he built for himself because he was like, why do people do this accounting this way? It works the same the other way, but that paid for like an overseas holiday for myself and my husband at the end of the first year without us having to find the cash for it. It’s play money and it’s valuable and all of those percentages, you can make them as simple as that or as complicated as you like.

If it’s important for you to have a sabbatical every five years, because you find yourself in a burnout cycle, there are percentages that are designed for payroll in corporations that are known that you can pick up and you can pay yourself a long service leave fund every time you get paid, because there’s a percentage that will tell you how to do it.

So that financial system from day one. A hundred percent because when we start talking about software there’s no excuse for not having brilliant financial software in 2026. It doesn’t matter if you’re in MYOB or Xero or Rounded or whatever it is. It’s all brilliant really compared to where we began a long time ago.

But if you’ve got it, read your financial reports, build that into your review preview as well.

Lynne: I was going to say one thing that does horrify me sometimes, that right at the beginning, which is what my accountant said when I first went freelance, is set up a business bank account. I had somebody round for scones, which is my thing, and she was still putting everything into her joint account and then she’d go in and her husband would take in money out to pay for the groceries and stuff. And I said, you’ll never know – it’s going to be a big mess when it comes to tax time. Set up a bank account, you can always move money out if you want to, but at least you’ll have a record.  Surprising how many people don’t do that, they just use their own personal bank account.

Leticia: It really surprises me and, and I’m horrified. People go, oh, I don’t do that. Like, what are you doing? At the very least you have a business bank account, which is separate from your personal account.  But I also suggest you have a business bank account, which is your operational account is in and out.

Then you know you have your tax savings account. So, you put your tax money in there and it’s not yours. So, it doesn’t matter if it’s $50,000 in there, it’s not yours. Then you can have a profit account, and you can have a leave savings account, and you keep your profits separate from your operations.

That way you only use the money that you’ve got available. And what it does is it makes you realise that you might have a whole lot of money in the bank, right? But what you can use today is only this much. And so, it keeps you on your toes a little bit. That is either stress inducing or useful, but I tend to find that it’s useful. Because if the worst happens and you do have to tap into those other accounts, hey, look at this amazing blessing. You have the money to help you, and you don’t have to find credit lines to help you do that. So, super, super valuable.

Rachel: I remember years ago, Nigel Bartlett said to me, you’ll only ever do this once where you don’t pay tax. You don’t take the tax out. Yes. You’ll only ever make that mistake once. That was when I very first started freelancing and I thought about that a lot over the years. When you get to the end of the year and you’re like, oh my God, twenty grand tax bill, or whatever it is.

Leticia: I remember a long time ago I had all like my accounts set up and I was saving money for the tax man and la la la la la. And I got an ATO bill that was $15,000 or something and I just paid it and went back to what I was doing. And I had a lady who was doing a cashflow analysis on my business because she was doing, setting up a side business and I was like, hey, I’ll be a guinea pig. And she called me and she goes; you just paid $15,000 without blinking. And I went, yeah, but that’s money’s not mine. It was there because it was there by design and she went, so many people can’t do that because they don’t think about it.

Leticia: So, think about that and secondarily to that, I want to also point out that a lot of people spend their life chasing money. And you can design your life, so you don’t have to. I remember when I last went to my corporate lawyer to have a new agreement drafted. He introduced a clause that turned me into a bank and that has been the biggest, most amazing saving grace, I think, because you don’t have to use it – it’s there. It’s gives you the ability to use it when you need it.

So, it’s at your discretion, but effectively it says, if this invoice is unpaid, then I may choose to charge you interest at the current cash target rate of the Reserve Bank of Australia plus three percentage points compounded daily. And when you do that, if you pull that weapon out, people pay on day three.

I think there’s a lot of sweat that’s unnecessary.

Lynne: One of the things I think as a freelancer, and lots of them say this, is about that up and down sort of feast and famine cycle. How can you move towards a more predictable income flow?

Leticia: I love this question. I think there are so many ways that we can do that. As writers, you can self-publish books, right? Because people talk about passive income and they think about selling courses. You can sell books because they always sell and once, they’re out, they always sell. And even if you’re only earning $2 from your book, you’re still getting $2 extra. So, if you’re capable of doing that, then that’s a really good way to do it. But also, I really like coming back to the friendship, nature of friendship and client experience.

Someone comes to you once. That’s great. They come back twice – that’s awesome. They come back three times, you could probably upsell them into a retainer of some kind. And once you do that, let’s say you have five clients paying $2,000 a month. You’ve got $120,000 a year locked in. And that’s really going to change your whole life because you’re not waiting 30 days or 60 days for money and spending your reserves because you’ve always got a regular payment.

Lynne: That makes sense.

Rachel: That’s a great idea. So, three times, that’s shows they really value your work and there’s probably a regular scope in there for you if you ask.

Leticia: Yes. If you ask. It’s the art of asking, isn’t it?

Lynne: Yes.

Leticia: You make it all about them. I’ve noticed that you’ve asked me three times to write blogs for you. Would you like me to do this every month? That without you having to ask, and I go, oh man, that would be amazing. That’s your first one.

Lynne: That makes sense, doesn’t it?

Rachel: Yes, it does. Is there one simple change that you’d advise freelancers to make so they can better manage their cash flow?

Leticia: I think it’s the percentage advice, actually. That will help you manage your cash flow like nothing else.

For freelancers that are really charitable, that also helps them to give consistently, they may wish to have that sort of a setup where they might want to donate a percentage of what comes in all the time, and that’s really important for some people, so that helps them to know what it is.

The beautiful thing about percentages is you’re not setting yourself a fixed fee, so the value goes up and down with how much comes in and it’s not like you’ve decided to donate $10 a month to this thing, but you don’t have $10. Maybe you’ve decided to donate 1%.

Rachel: Yes, and it also helped, really, I found the percentages system really helps you build your super.

Leticia: Really does. Yes.

Rachel: Easy to drop the ball.

Leticia: Or whatever other investing. It might be important for you to buy gold or save for a house or whatever. You put a nest egg aside for your kids.

Lynne: All those things. 

Wow. Well, we’re near the end of the podcast now, Leticia. It’s been so interesting. Shall we end it off with the fast three questions?

Leticia: Yes.

Lynne: Are you ready?

Leticia: Let’s do it. Let’s do it.

Lynne: Let’s do it.

Leticia: Scary.

Rachel: Okay. First question. Favourite tools of the trade that you can’t live without?

Leticia: I hate this question because there are so many.

Rachel: Your father’s spreadsheets?

Leticia: The spreadsheets, I think.

First and foremost, a pen and a notebook because I can still write if I have no electricity. I can write if I have no internet. I can still work if I have a pen and a notebook and I can do other things later, like I could take notes in meetings, and it doesn’t disappear unless I tip a coffee on it or set fire to it. They’re two pretty extreme things. A pen and a notebook is my favourite.

Lynne: Love it.

Rachel: Very old school.

Leticia: Very.

Lynne: That’s good. Question number two is one habit that genuinely saves you time.

Leticia: I have so many in my whole life, because my whole life feels like a systems playbook sometimes. But the one that I think most relevant to your listeners. Okay. Maybe 1% of them will pick it up and do it, but I’m going to suggest it anyway. It’s called set up and pack down. I’ll tell you how it works if you like.

Set up and pack down I refined when I was writing full-time, flat out like I was writing all day long, and I had to find a way that capitalised on my neurology rather than my willpower or my energy levels.

So, it goes like this. The night before you start work, say Sunday night, whatever it is, you set up your desk for your first job of the next day. So, you get out your research, all your notes, you pull up all your files, you open all the relevant programs, and you might want to put your computer to sleep after that, but then you put everything else away. When you get to work, you just drop straight in. There’s none of that – what do I need? Where’s the brief? Where’s la la that wastes the first hour and a half. At the end of that session, you pack it down completely. You commit all your repos. If you’re working in repos, you update your files. You write update notes for your next update to your client.

You write update notes for your next session for yourself. You update your timekeeping like everything. Is the pack down. You pack it down. Then as soon as it’s packed down, you set up the second thing and then you leave. You don’t do it. You go and do something totally different. So you go for a walk, you stare at the clouds, you go have a conversation, you absorb somebody else’s work. It’s the opposite of what you’ve just been doing because that’s what’s going to recharge you. You do that for 15 minutes and then you come back and you drop straight back in.

It’s that whole old chestnut that a good day tomorrow starts tonight, but it’s on steroids because it replaces your willpower with environmental controls.

Lynne: I have a philosophy of never having a blank page.

Rachel: Yes.

Lynne: So as soon as I finish one piece…

Rachel: I was thinking of you.

Lynne: I always have something. I start the next one. I may not do much, but exactly like you do, I pull out the transcript or the notes. And I set up a template and so it’s there and I’ve already, while I’m still writing, it’s good.

Leticia: Yes.

Lynne: So, you’re not sitting there looking at it.

Leticia: There’s a compliment to that, which I’ve used for writing books too, which is that you never finish. At the end of a sentence. You finish in the middle, it’s like, pull…

Lynne: I’ve heard that.

Leticia: Pull out in the middle when it feels good. And end on a good rep. All those things because your brain will just continue.

Lynne: Yes, yes. 

Leticia: There’s no thinking involved.

Rachel: Oh, I love that. All right; we have one final question. One thing you wish you’d done sooner in your career.

Leticia: I actually think taking my financials seriously. That’s the big one, because my financial life was a disaster for so long, and then I got to the point where it wasn’t, and I thought, why, how did it get to where it was? And why didn’t someone tell me? I think part of that is having a good accountant.

I wish I had a really good accountant a lot earlier. I’d had accountants that set up business structures that were wrong. I had them set up business structures that they assumed I needed that were not what I wanted or had specified, but I didn’t know enough to interrogate. I ended up paying so much money to the tax office because of a previous accountant that I had a tax holiday for a whole year when I was earning a lot of money and I only had all those things because I found that one guy who hates the tax office, who is an amazing accountant, who helped support not just my business, but support me within the business and to know what’s right, and what works and what’s important, and those things. If that’s all you do is get that and you’ll be better off.

Rachel: Get that good accountant.

Leticia: The good accountant with really smart advice, not accounting advice, like smart advice. And I think that’s the difference. I think there are a lot of accountants who do fantastic work, who are, have always been a wagie. You really need someone that’s been at the pointy end, I think.

Lynne: That makes sense

Leticia: And sometimes they’re hard to find. It helps so much.

Lynne: For sure. Oh, Leticia, thank you so much. It’s been such a good chat, and I think it really practical for all our listeners out there. So, tell us where people can find you.

Leticia: You can find me on LinkedIn. Connect with me on LinkedIn.

Lynne: Of course. Well, you’re a bit feisty, I hear.

Leticia: Well, there’s a bit of tough love going on over there. A bit of brutal honesty. Or my website, which is leticiamooney.com. So, you’ll find my newsletter there and links to my books and there’s like a bunch of tools and a deep blog and all the things. 

Rachel: Fabulous. Okay. We will pop that up in the show notes. Thank you so much for being with us. This has just been really interesting.

Lynne: So good.

Rachel: I’ve learnt a lot.

Lynne: That’s good. After 25 years of freelancing, Rach.

Rachel: There’s always something new to learn that you have always made me think differently about a few of my systems. So yes. Thank you.

Lynne: Thank you.

Leticia: You’re welcome.

Lynne: And we’ll be back next week.

Rachel: We will.

Lynne: Fantastic. Thanks. Bye

Rachel: Bye.

Credits:

Connect with Leticia via her website: Https://leticiamooney.com 

Find Lynne www.lynnetestoni.com

Find Rachel www.rachelsmith.com.au

Rachel’s List www.rachelslist.com.au

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