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Hey Reader,

Quick personal update: I had a baby!

Baby Alice arrived back in April, so I've been taking a break with the new addition to our family. (Client Portal, Project Pack, and Design Academy are all running smoothly with my team, don't worry!)

One good thing about these slower-paced days is that I get lots of time to think.

I've been reflecting on 13 years of being self-employed, from freelancing to running product businesses, and it's been quite nice having the headspace to look back on everything I've learned.

Every journey has these turning points, these forks in the road that put you on a particular trajectory. They may seem small at the time, but it's only when you look back that you realise THAT was the point where things changed.

One big realisation I had was that a disproportionate amount of opportunities came from attending (and speaking at) conferences.

I'm not just talking about big opportunities like partnerships or sales. Often it was just being able to ask someone who runs a similar business a question about how they do things - and that proved more helpful than any business book or blog article I could have read on the subject.

The unpolished behind-the-scenes of how real people are doing things.

Not SEO-optimised, no clickbait headlines, no story-arc. Just a simple answer to a simple question.

Now, conferences aren't realistically something I'll be doing for the next year or two. So I've been thinking about what I could do instead, and I had this idea that I'd love to run by you.

I've been collating all these random questions I've had over the years and jotting down nuggets of advice that I've learned, and I thought I'd spend some time answering them (just as I would if you walked up to me at a conference with a question).

Real behind-the-scenes things like "How do you price projects?" or "Have you ever fired a client?" (Spoiler: YES!).

I thought this could be fun to spend some time answering them in those little windows of time that I get in between feeding, rocking, and playing with Alice.

I will keep this information private and share it only with this email list. So no blog post, just email.

Let me know if this is something you’re interested in. If you'd like to view the list of questions I've been thinking up, you can access the living Google Doc here.

And if there's anything else you'd like me to add, just reply to this email and ask away! Big or small, I'll consider everything!

--Laura

P.S. Much of the advice I’m going to give goes against best practices. But I don’t think anybody actually follows best practices religiously. There’s a difference between what you should do and what you actually do. I’m going to tell you what I actually do.