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Feb 21, 2021

Podcast 01: What You Will Learn From The Design Startup Show

Podcast 01 on what you can learn from the design startup show

Episode Transcript:

Hey guys,

Thank you so much for being here.

Welcome to the Design Startup Show, and I’m Marilyn Wo.

And I just appreciate you for joining me here.

This is the very first episode, so I would just like to give you kind of a run down and maybe a summary of what you will expect in the coming shows. 

Basically, I have been through a lot of struggles and experienced about 10 years of freelancing and challenges and getting out of my comfort zone for so long and I hope to just share with you what I’ve been through. How I overcome all of them and also the work that I’m going through right now. 

So it’s a lot of past experiences and work in public at the present moment. 

So I hope this is a good take away for you to also kind of use them, use whatever that I share with you to apply to your own graphic design businesses

I want you to also have success in your business rather than struggling all the time with the passion that you have in graphic design, because I have been there before as well.

So, as a graphic design freelancer, I was just enjoying my time for those 10 years since 2005. But I met a road block, a very big one when I had my first child.

And that was in 2013 and the roadblock was there because I had to care for my baby and I had to care for my clients as well. 

Before that, there wasn’t that much issue with freedom right, because I was a solo freelancer. You know, I can just choose to react to my client’s work. That’s what I used to do, and I can be there for them. 

I can take care of them 24/7, as long as I want. But I did not have the mindset that I was not creating my own assets. I was just basically helping my clients 24/7. 

I was just doing things, building other people’s assets rather than my own. So I didn’t kind of reserve time for that.

So, only when I had my first baby, then I realised that I had been missing out on building my own assets that I can grow with and eventually be financially independent.

So this podcast is, mainly to share with you these lessons learned, to be able to help you to also build your own business asset.

So that, eventually, you can become a business owner or an entrepreneur where you don’t really have to trade time for money. 

We all definitely trade hours for dollars, even entrepreneurs, in some sense. But are you trading the hours for yourself? Or are you trading all the hours for your clients? 

That was what I was doing when I was a freelancer, and I didn’t know that.

I could not go on a holiday without not getting an income. Means, if I go for a holiday, there is no money coming in. If I stopped working, there’s no money coming in.

But now I am building something, I’m building a business where, even if I go for a holiday, the work is going on on its own with people hired, with automation, with tech that I’ve built up.

This is something you can learn from this podcast as well.

At the same time, I’m also going to talk about building wealth, because as a graphic designer, it doesn’t mean you have to ignore wealth and money.

This is part of life and this is part of having options to enjoy life. This is also what I will touch on.

Well, eventually, my goal is to be financially independent. I’m now at the age of 40 and I would like to be able to be debt free in 5 years time. 

And in 10 years time, I will have a residual income that can support my life, support my family’s life, and also support my childrens’ education. So that they will be debt-free by the time they graduate rather than having to pay the bank all the time even after they have graduated.

This podcast is also to share with you how I’m going to do that. And it’s not all based on my graphic design business, but my graphic design business will also contribute in terms of the profits that come from there.

The next thing is that I’ve also been struggling with acquiring clients, keeping customers, keeping clients. So if these are also the things you’ve been struggling with, this podcast should help you. Because, I have overcome that and I’m also putting in the work to create new ways and coming up with new methods to help with sales systems, marketing systems, as well as the internal operation processes to kind of maintain our customer base. And these are what you will be learning from the podcast as well.

So all these will be pretty much in a way solo messages from me. But if I were to have any industry experts coming in, you will also hear interviews from us.

So there are many things you will learn from here. I hope that this is something that can help you in your business. If you are a freelancer, hopefully this will help you transit to a business owner, because… as a freelancer, there’s nothing wrong, I mean it’s great to be a freelancer as well. There are also good things about it.

But, because I have kind of transformed from there, I would like to share the good things that came out from there. So I hope this is something you will also learn.

And the last thing is, how I transformed, how I transited. Because the transition did not just come about like that. There were a lot of struggles in between. Like how did I kind of sell my services in a way where it’s just a few steps, even just one step, rather than so many steps with proposals and with the back and forth, people not paying my invoices, creating invoices… too many steps.

So what I did was, I productized my service. And if you have heard of this term, or if you’ve not. Productize is pretty much packaging your services so that your services are being sold like products.

If you know SaaS, Software as a Service. What I did to my design service was to Design as a Service or a Service as a Service, right.

It’s sold like, you can call it a, box of premix that you see in the supermarket. Rather than selling to somebody that you are going to bake a cake for the person, you actually put in all the ingredients and recipe in one box and you sell to that person the box.

So you don’t really have to be there to make that cake. But you either hire people or you make machines, where these machines will pack up these boxes that is based on your instructions based on your recipe and ingredients.

And they will all be packed together, and you don’t have to be there right. All these will be sold by supermarkets.

So you do the distribution, and you create that operation system and get your secret out there, or good stuff out there.

This is basically what I have done to my service, and I will also run through that with you in detail over the course of this podcast.

And, yah, for work in progress and work in public, I will just post this up and you will just hear all the episodes with me solo, just like this. 

It can be very quick, 5 minutes or up to 15 minutes of me sharing what I have learned for the day. Or it can be 15 minutes to 30 minutes of what I have learned before.

So this is what you will expect from me.

If this is what you dig, you should just subscribe, listen to it and give a positive review as and when you can.

I truly appreciate you for that and I hope all success to you, that you will become financially independent as well one day, and we can all grow together.

Thank you and see you in the next episode.

Bye.