The Plan

After a year of freelancing client work around Boston for small businesses and people selling items or their services online, I started to piece together a plan of how I’d start my business. At first, it was a mess. I never worked on social media prior, I wasn’t used to the attention, and I would constantly get discouraged over rookie starter-level things, such as being unfollowed by bigger businesses, executives unconnecting from my LinkedIn, trolls, the never-ending cycle of ‘hate-stream’ media, over-thinking almost everything to the point it would freeze me from taking action.

Losing my Mother though was the most-inspirational beginning I could’ve had. When you see someone that you love suffer in their last hours, the entire world shuts off and fades into the background. I don’t know how professional or unprofessional it was, but I didn’t care. I literally stopped giving an ounce of thought to what others thought, yet I had to learn how to mend copywriting around the reader, videos that engage particular viewers, appealing to a specific niche, staying consistent, posting frequently, it was a blur.

I’d post very professional content on my small business page and get followed by giant talking heads of the world, then on my personal page I’d explain to my audience that I began posting cat vlogs, funny Reels and try to motivate others to take action. Yet, the unfollows began.

At first, I had total lack of clarity, no target audience, no niche, didn’t use my voice, had little credibility and very little experience. Self-doubt leaked in, comparing and contrasting was an obstacle, and managing it for myself and clients became a juggling act that I’ll never forget.

I stepped back, sought mentors for e-commerce, social media marketing, content creation and started to fluctuate on a regular basis between thoughts of ‘I’m so happy, I don’t even care!” – to – “Is that good enough? Will they like that? How do I keep that up?”

I learned about perception, public awareness, selling yourself and presentation value. Yet still, the world teaches us to be ourselves and be happy, yet almost-everything I did started to impact others online and in my personal life. If I twitched one way, ten would follow, I’d lose a prospect, gain a brand deal, get an event invite, until I slowly started getting more and more used to how truly judgemental society is, especially through such a small glass lense of content.

I didn’t have that many business suits and ties, my equipment was half-decent, and I was running on straight passion with entrepreneurial spirit trying to figure out a way to be happy in my personal life and pay bills at the same time.

I started to draft out a plan, and being my first business of course it didn’t go accordingly. This field is very competitive, comfortably-uncomfortable at all times being as public as it gets through multi-media and growing connections. Insecurities come out.

The plan was to chase my dreams and ignore the noise.