Riding the Waves: Balancing Energy & Relaxation Through Ups & Downs Ep 124

After a brief break from episodes -- I'M BACK!

Key topics discussed in this episode:

• Reason for podcast hiatus: Increased workload and events, especially after back-to-school season.
• Balancing podcasting with business: Struggles of maintaining a regular schedule while focusing on client work.
• Seasonal fluctuations in business: Experiences of ups and downs in revenue throughout the year.
• Strategies for managing expenses: Adjusting spending based on income levels.
• Self-care and burnout prevention: Importance of rest and relaxation, as exemplified by a recent hammock experience.
• Future plans for the podcast: Incorporating audience questions and expanding on LinkedIn topics.
• Call to action: Encourages listeners to subscribe, review, and suggest topics.

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My name is Brenda Meller. I'm a LinkedIn coach, consultant, speaker, and author. My company is Meller Marketing and I help business professionals get a bigger slice of the LinkedIn pie.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Seasonal Trends in Business and Self-Care
• 10:06 Podcast Promotion and Future Episodes

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:41

It's been a little bit since I've had a new podcast on my show and I'm going to pull back the curtain a bit in today's episode and talk to you about why. Now, if you're like me, you may have many things you want to work on. Especially if you're enthusiastically self-employed. It means you're running in a bunch of different directions. You always have new projects, new initiatives, new events, things like that, and sometimes we're our own best worst enemy. Right For me, when it comes to my podcast. I've been pulling from a lot of my past interviews from the vault, so to speak some really great interviews I've had with individuals over the past year and even in the past years. I've gone back a few years for some of these episodes and I try to blend these out and balance these out with some individual LinkedIn profile audits to give you the opportunity to see some of my expertise and also to see me in action, working with my clients, and also to benefit from the insights and tips that I'm sharing with those individuals. And every now and again I'll do a solo episode, like I'm doing here today, where I'm just talking. It's just me and you talking today, and I'd like to share some additional insights and, depending on where my business is at, I'd like to bring these insights to you. So, as it relates to my podcast, I set a goal to when I launched my podcast. I would have at least one episode a week and I realized that I had such a rich library of interviews to pull from that I wanted to do two interviews a week. I normally will publish those new episodes on Monday and Wednesdays and I've been trying to get a little bit further ahead to pre-schedule those shows so that I'm not always scrambling last minute to get them published Now. I did really well for a few months there and then September hit and a lot of things were happening. We have back to school I've got one school-aged child still in the house with us here and I had a bunch of events that were going on. I'm a very event-heavy person and sometimes those events will take precedence over getting those podcast interviews scheduled and getting those podcast episodes published as well. I've also had an increase in client engagements, and that's a great thing to have. A great problem to have, wouldn't you agree, not being able to publish your podcast because your business is starting to pick up and I have to share.

Speaker 1: 2:55

As someone who is self-employed. You'll probably experience this at some point, if you haven't already. It will be happening too. You're going to have some really great seasons of your business, times where your calendar is full and you're really booking out two to three weeks in advance, even to do a discovery call. There's going to be other seasons in your business where I like to say it's bad, but it's a softer month. Right, it's softer, your calendar's a bit more open and you're even starting to look on the horizon, not with panic per se, but a bit of like what happened? Why aren't the leads, why aren't the clients continuing to come to me?

Speaker 1: 3:30

And you know, I've been riding this wave of entrepreneurship now for seven years a little over seven years now, actually and what I have noticed is there's trends and there's seasons of my business, and I track my revenue month over month, and I've been tracking this since the first month that I started to get some revenue really in my full-time business, which was October of 2017. And I've noticed there are certain months of the year where it's always going to take a dip, and then the following month might be a dip as well, and then it rebounds, and it rebounds with a vengeance, in a very positive way. December is one of those months where things are always a little bit lighter because we're being preoccupied with holiday engagements and family engagements and time off from work etc. And certainly the summer months can be a bit lighter as well. I've even noticed over the past few years it seems like now that we're in this post-pandemic area that people are really starting to travel more, take more vacations, spend more time with family and get out of the house. Right, and we deserve it. We want to have that time that's spent that way and because of that, we're also taking the foot off the gas pedal a little bit over our businesses over the summer. So that will have an impact and especially we feel it as entrepreneurs. We feel that first and foremost because the paycheck doesn't keep coming in right. We're always looking for that next client, unless you're building up retainer revenue or some type of a revenue model where there's reoccurring revenue every month. You do feel it. You feel it a lot sooner than some of our corporate counterparts. So when that happens, what I've learned to do is be aware that, yes, this is a season right, and this season will pass. There'll be another month coming up where I will rebound and my revenue will increase again.

Speaker 1: 5:14

Now I always try to align my revenue with my expenses. So when my revenue isn't as high as it's been in the past and I'm seeing some patterns and maybe it dipping a bit, then I need to pull back from some of my expenses. Sometimes that means canceling subscriptions for services that maybe I'm not really using that much anymore right or downgrading the level services that maybe I'm not really using that much anymore right or downgrading the level of service so I can save a bit money here and there. There's been times where I've used interns and virtual assistants to help me out, and there's been times where I've had to pull back on the number of hours that I've been working with those individuals and sometimes I've had to take a pause on that as well. I always try to be very upfront with my team when those months are occurring and let them know that it is cyclical. Things will come back. It's not personal, it's not anything towards them, it's just the viability of my business. I need to make sure that my revenue and expenses are aligning with each other. So there's always that challenge of when it starts to pick back up again. When do you start to increase some of those services that you used before, whether it's paying for the subscriptions to shorten your time frame, or hiring or ramping up at VA again, or when to hire somebody full-time right and this is a challenge I continue to work through, always paying attention to my bottom line and also paying attention to my level of energy and my level of fatigue.

Speaker 1: 6:37

Now, over the past week, I held an event yesterday. It was a shift summit, making the shift from being a corporate employee to being self-employed, and I really specialized this event in serving introverts. I'm an introvert and I decided to really focus in on a niche category for individuals who are making the shift to become self-employed and who were introverts. I'm an introvert and I decided to really focus in on a niche category for individuals who are making the shift to become self-employed and who were introverts, and I brought in 12 experts from different areas of business and marketing coaches. Some were clients and members of my programs and others were friends and connections I've made and even some new connections as well. It was a lot of work pulling that event together and I have to say the event went really smoothly. It was held yesterday, as I'm recording this podcast. It was held yesterday, september 14th, and I even noticed the day before Friday I just felt really exhausted in the afternoon. I was really tired around three o'clock.

Speaker 1: 7:26

Now I turned 50 earlier this month too, so maybe it's the age catching up with me a little bit. I embrace my age, and age is a gift that is denied to many, so I'm very proud to announce that I turned 50. And my family got me. I said the only thing I want for my birthday is a hammock, and they found one. Actually, they found it on Facebook marketplace. I use hammock, which was perfect because they didn't spend too much money, which I don't like to spend a lot of money on things and we installed it about a week ago in our backyard and it's a really nice hammock.

Speaker 1: 7:53

So Friday afternoon, after my daughter was home from school, I'd taken the dog for a walk. I just laid in the hammock and I laid there and I kind of got into this twilight, almost sleep. But I just allowed my body to just relax and for me, I'm really driven. I'm always doing something, so it's really hard sometimes for us to let go and to just allow that quiet to occur and even thinking about the luxury of just laying in a hammock and taking a nap right Now.

Speaker 1: 8:21

I had my dog, pepper, outside with me and she loves squirrels and she's always barking at different things that are coming into our yard. There's only been once or twice where she's caught a squirrel and it's a catch-and-release type of thing, but I have to be on the lookout for her. It was a beautiful day, so I wanted to keep Pepper out with me, so I allowed her to just lay in the yard with me as I was kind of dozing in my hammock, and it almost reminded me of the days when my kids were really little, when they were babies, and as a mom you wanted to kind of take a quick power nap while they were sleeping. But you had to almost have one ear open all the time waiting for that cry to occur from across the room, and it was the same way I was waiting for Pepper to make barking noises. So I will say it felt restful, but it wasn't a solid nap, if that makes sense. But still it was my body telling me you need to slow down, you need to take a break, you need to rest, you need to relax and enjoy this beautiful afternoon, and I did that right.

Speaker 1: 9:15

So I share all of this with you because if you've been an avid listener of my podcast and you've missed the past couple episodes, I want to let you know that my plans are to resume recording and to get some more episodes into your ears. Now, if there's specific topics you'd like to hear about in the areas of marketing or LinkedIn or different things like that, do let me know. But what I think I'm going to do is I'm going to start to produce shows based on questions that I'm getting from my audience. Now, I'm already doing this technique in my LinkedIn posts, and I was thinking about this a few weeks ago. Why don't I do the same thing for a podcast, where I can expand further into explanation of a LinkedIn concept or a marketing concept, and that way, you have both a blog or a post to read, as well as a podcast, an episode, to listen to as well. So I do hope that you find my show helpful.

Speaker 1: 10:06

If you haven't already done so, I'd love it if you could subscribe to my podcast on whatever network that you're on, and do give us reviews as well. My understanding is that when you give a positive five-star review for a show, it helps that show to appear more in searches when people are looking for certain keywords. As it relates to the show. All right, with that said, I'm going to sign off and go ahead and get this episode published. I'll probably get this published tomorrow morning, monday, so we'll be back on the same Monday and Wednesday cadence and look forward to additional episodes which will include both interviews. They'll include solo topics like today's show, and I'll also be including more of those LinkedIn profile mini audits in the future. Until then, my friends, stay safe, stay healthy and have a wonderful day.