Episode 013: A Day In My Life As A New Entrepreneur
Happy Thanksgiving to those of you listening to this episode when it first airs. This year, among so many other things, I am thankful for all of you who tune into this show on a weekly basis and for all the guests who have been so willing to come on the show. I hope today’s show gives you a little break from all the buzz of family, food comas and Thanksgiving dinner table clapbacks! If you’ve tuned into the last couple episodes you know I’m currently doing a series of solo episodes during our hiatus. I’ll be back with more great guest interviews in January. Now let’s dive into today’s episode where I’ll be sharing what a “day-in-the-life” looks like for me as a new entrepreneur. As I planned to leave my 9-5 job, I literally googled “day in a life of an entrepreneur” because I was looking for ways to get organized around all the ideas I needed to put into action. I came across a few YouTube videos and blog posts but very quickly discovered that I would need to create a schedule and process more tailored to my lifestyle. Most of the videos and posts I found were from people who were more established and further into their entrepreneurial journey. At the time I wished I could have heard from someone who was still early on in their journey and was still trying to figure things out. Of course, it takes a certain level of vulnerability to share a work in progress and in a world of curated content, being raw and unpolished may not always play so well on a highlight reel. In any case, I hope this view into where I am this early on helps to fill in the blanks for you if you’re curious or gives someone the boost of courage they need to take the next step. The cliff notes version is that this process is 1-part prayer, 1 part messy and 1-part a superwoman feat as you leap into the unknown. To set the tone for the “day in a life” I think it’s important to share a bit more about my transition from my 9 to 5. The transition I would consider my first two months or so of entrepreneurship to be more of a transition period. I am now 6 months in. During the first month, I continued to demo my new app to companies as well as created content and ran campaigns around the app. Once I caught up on those, we went on vacation. It was so liberating to just up and leave without having to coordinate a million schedules. It was also the best way for me to reset, get separation from my previous role. and also spend some much-needed time with my family. We spent time in New Mexico and visited the Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks national monument and also spent 9 days at a Disney World resort. The girls loved scaling the tent rocks and are still talking about our time at Disney. Part of this transition time was also me catching up on doctors’ appointments, errands, lunch with friends I had been neglecting, house reno projects we had been pushing back. It was a great time to clear up all the backlog and free up space in my mind. So that was between May and June of 2018. Getting down to work By June I launched my website, serwaaadjeipelle.com. I had been chipping away at it throughout what I call my transition period. I am very much bootstrapped as an entrepreneur and didn’t feel the need to hire a designer to build the site especially since I could use a platform like Wordpress. Of course, that could change in the future but for now, it serves its purpose. I also spent time setting up my Gmail and google analytics accounts and laying out a social media strategy. If you follow my personal Instagram account, @Serwaa_ap you probably noticed a difference in my social media presence between pre and post-May of 2018. By early August I was ready to start launching my podcast as well as the consulting side of my business. Ok, now that we’ve set the stage, I wake up daily at 5:30 am especially since my husband wakes up around that time to work out. I used to work out with him but quickly substituted that workout time to finish homework from the MBA program I’m wrapping up ...