Turn Your Solo Freelance Business into an Agency with Caity Cronkhite

SEASON 8, EPISODE 8

Over the past year, we've heard from many listeners who are curious about scaling up their freelance businesses into an agency. Agencies can allow freelancers to take on bigger projects that they might not have the capacity to do alone. They can also attract more well-known clients, because those big-namers want to work business-to-company, rather than business-to-individual with a freelancer. But what does it actually take to go from solo freelancer to agency owner?

In this episode, Wudan talks with Caity Cronkhite. 

Caity transformed her solo freelance technical writing business into a multi-million dollar technical writing agency. She is the founder and CEO of Good Words LLC, a technical writing and documentation consulting firm that’s on a mission to rid the world of bad docs.

Caity and Wudan dive more into how to know when it's time to scale to an agency, the benefits of building an agency incrementally and mindset shifts required to go from solopreneur to agency owner.

Full Transcript Below:

Wudan Yan- Hi everyone. Welcome back to The Writers' Co-op. I am your host and executive producer, Wudan Yan. On this episode of the show, we're going to talk about agencies and how to take your solo freelance business, and scale it to an agency. In the last decade of freelancing, I've actually really come to respect agencies. They tend to attract more well-known clients, because those big-namers want to work business to company, rather than business to individual, as the freelancer. In the past year, Forbes, for instance, hired me to write branded content for a life insurance agency. I probably wouldn't have been able to land that client myself, but through Forbes as an intermediary, I did. Clients see agencies as being more standardized, which suits them if they want work products that are consistent in style, which they wouldn't necessarily get if they independently hired like five freelancers, for instance. And it would probably require a lot more work internally for them to standardize. As I work to launch my fact checking agency, Factual, this is a point that a lot of prospective buyers bring up to me. And because agencies often take on liability, they can command a higher rate. Some branded content studios I know pay freelance writers up to like $10 a word for content marketing. If that's what's trickling down to the freelancer, think about how much more the agency is earning on top of that to stay profitable. I know many freelancers out there may be agency-curious. So today, I brought on a guest to take us behind the scenes of how to go from freelancing to building an agency. That guest is Caity Cronkite. Caity is the founder and CEO of Good Words LLC, a technical writing and documentation consulting firm that's on a mission to rid the world of bad docs. Good Words was born in the technology industry and delivers ongoing strategic management and implementation support for some of the most technically-sophisticated companies across industries, from Fortune 500 companies to five-person startups. Caity was born and raised on a remote farm in rural Indiana. She eventually left her prairie roots to attend Carnegie Mellon University, where she received a degree in technical writing and communication. After college, Caity went West, first to San Francisco, then to Seattle to start her career as a technical writer and eventually an entrepreneur. Caity loves using her background in life experience to support people from non-traditional backgrounds on their own paths to careers in leadership, entrepreneurship and technology. Full disclosure, Caity and I are pretty good friends. You might be able to pick up on that throughout the episode. You may have noticed that I've been bringing a lot of people this season who I've known for a while in my professional and personal life. That actually, I think, helps me make better decisions on who will be the best guests for my audience. Before we dive into today's episode, did you know that we have an online community for The Writers' Co-op? If you're looking to do big things in your freelance business this year, such as scale to an agency, or just crave ongoing support from a welcoming, safe space, come join The Writers' Co-op Slack community. Members are sharing best practices and tips when it comes to running their freelance businesses. And I just can't overstate how important it is to have this psychologically safe-space to help bounce ideas around. You can sign up today at the All-Access level on Patreon to get a link to join. That's at patreon.com/TWCpod. Okay, enough for me. Here's Caity. All right, Caity, welcome to The Writers' Co-op. It's so fun to have you here.

Caity Cronkhite- Thank you so much, Wudan. I'm excited to be here.

Wudan- I know a lot about your career story, because we are friends, but also I wanted you specifically to come on the show, because I think a lot of people who have been working for themselves for years and years, probably at one point or another, if things are going well, have thought about starting an agency. And I feel like there are just so few opportunities where people peel back the curtain on that process. So yeah, I'm really excited.

Caity- I'm also excited. Yeah, I don't get to talk a lot about the kind of process of developing my business. So this is going to be fun.

Wudan- Well, to start, can you tell us about your career journey and how you got to where you are today?

Caity- Sure. So I mean, as you already know, I currently am the owner of a technical writing consulting firm and agency called Good Words. But the way I got to owning my agency was, I was actually a technical writer in my own career. So I majored in technical writing and communication at Carnegie Mellon University. After college, I moved to the San Francisco Bay area, where I was a technical writer for other people for a long time. So just as an individual contributor, I worked at large enterprise companies as a writer on large teams. After that, I also worked in startups for a while, which was great experience for ultimately starting my agency, actually. But I then went on to be a sole writer at a couple of tech startups in the Bay Area. And then the last startup that I worked for was, I like to say, it went the way of the startup, which is to say that they started running out of money. It was pretty clear that they were not going to last very long. So at that point, I was really looking for kind of the next thing to do in my career, and I wasn't finding a whole lot of inspiring jobs that I was interested in applying in, so I decided to give freelancing a go. I thought freelancing would be a fun challenge after that, and I absolutely loved being a freelancer. It was, it was really a fun and rewarding challenge in my career. I did that full-time for a couple of years, and then at some point, I grew my freelance business to be too large. I had too much work. I had too many clients, and I basically had the choice to make, which was to continue freelancing and start saying "no" to these awesome projects that my clients were putting on the table in front of me, or to make the decision, essentially to start an agency and start hiring other people to help. So I think we know what choice I ultimately made. So today, actually, almost to the day, I have been running my agency for the last seven years.

Wudan- That's awesome. And how many years were you freelancing for?

Caity- I was freelancing for about two years, and in the early days of the agency as well, I was still also working on projects, on my own writing projects.

Wudan- Yeah, makes sense. I think one of the things that makes you extremely relatable is kind of how your upbringing has shaped your very entrepreneurial spirit. So would you be willing to share a little bit about that?

Caity- Oh totally. Yeah. So I did not come from a tech background. I did not really come from an entrepreneurial background at all. I grew up on a farm in rural Indiana. So I was an only child on a 90-acre farm in the middle of nowhere. We were like an hour away from the nearest city that anybody had ever heard of. So it was, it was, definitely a different environment, particularly than Seattle, where I live now, or San Francisco, where I grew my career. So I would say, you know, it has influenced my entrepreneurial journey in some interesting ways. You know, I grew up in a place where there really weren't a lot of economic opportunities for most people. There were a couple of factories you could go work at. You could drive an hour and a half one way to go to work in Indianapolis or one of the other surrounding cities or something like that. But there wasn't really a lot of opportunity for ambitious people. So what I think that taught me was, from a very early age, I was constantly scanning the horizon for new opportunities. I was constantly scanning for things that would help take me to the next level, either in my education or in my experience. And I really brought that into kind of creating my company. So you know, I didn't set out with any intention to build a company when I started my career, or even when I started freelancing. It was really just like, I was looking for the next best opportunity for my career. After the startup, that meant freelancing. And at a certain point in my freelancing journey, that meant taking the leap to start the agency. So yeah, it has had an interesting influence, I would say, on my career and how I really think about opportunity. And it definitely played a role, I think, in how I got to where I am right now.

Wudan- I think when you say, you know you didn't grow up around entrepreneurship, your environment definitely helped you to learn how to problem solve. And I actually, I mean, the longer that I do what I do, I really do think that entrepreneurship is really about problem solving, right?

Caity- Mhm.

Wudan- Yeah, there's so many environments that could lead us on that path,

Caity- Absolutely, totally, and it's one of my favorite things about my business, is that, like, especially starting out, I had so many new problems to solve, and it was so fun. So.

Wudan- More problems, more money. Question mark?

Caity- Sometimes.

Wudan- Yeah, sometimes.

Caity- We hope.

Wudan- So, okay, I want to ask, how did you run a freelance business within two years of getting, like, too much work for you to even think about, like, what do I do with this problem?

Caity- When I started my freelance business, I really—I mean, I was winging it, for sure. I wasn't even sure if I was gonna like freelancing when I started. And so I started really small by taking a part-time project while I was still employed full-time. And I liked it enough to continue it and to ultimately quit my job to pursue freelancing full-time. And I really relied on my network, which I think is so important, especially in agency work. I would just ask my network on LinkedIn, people that I had worked with before, people I had enjoyed working with in my full-time jobs. You know, hey, do you know anyone? Do you have any work, any projects at your current company where I could help and I can make an impact? And I cannot tell you, as a freelancer, how effective that was. I mean, like I kept myself busy full-time or more for two years, just by asking my friends and former colleagues for connections and for referrals. So that was hugely important.

Wudan- That's amazing. I mean, this season of the show is about thinking expansively, and I think building an agency is an example of that. But to your point of just, you know, telling people how you can help them, and asking if they know of anything. I do generally think of that as one of the biggest barriers that people face when they are just like, I need to fill these buckets for work and like, nothing is coming around. And I'm always, as a business coach, like, Well, have you tried asking people in your life and people you've loved working with? Like, how has that come up?

Caity- Absolutely. And there's a good chance that the people you loved working with also loved working with you and want—

Wudan- Yes

Caity- —to work with you again. So.

Wudan- Yes. 100%. So okay, you freelanced for two years, and then what did taking that leap from freelancing to starting an agency look like, logistically? Like, what was the lead time?

Caity- There was actually almost no lead time. Like I said, I didn't set out with the goal of starting an agency, but for much of my own freelance career, even those two years where I was working independently, I was working more than full-time. So I would often have 50 or 60 hours of work a week of projects to do. And so at some point, that started to become untenable. I had so much work on my plate that I had finally reached this point where I was like, I cannot reasonably handle all of this. Like, I'm starting to burn out, or I'm just stretched too thin. I need to either say no, or I need to take the leap to actually hire somebody else to help me with this. And so essentially, there was a day where a former colleague of mine was like, hey, I have 20 hours of work a week on this project that's going to last six months. I could do the math to see how much money that was going to be worth, and it killed me to have to say no to it. And so I was like, hold on, I'm gonna try hiring someone for this. And now here we are. So that's really how that went. There was really almost no lead time. It was—it was all just me deciding that it was time to take the leap, essentially, when the opportunity presented itself.

Wudan- So that person was a subcontractor? How did that work?

Caity- Initially, yes. So initially, I, like I said, I went into developing my agency very similarly to how I had started freelancing, which I wasn't even sure I was gonna like it. I wasn't even sure I wanted to do it full-time. So I started by hiring my first person part-time as a subcontractor on a 1099 for, you know, a couple of months of a project. And then built from there.

Wudan- I love that, and I think sometimes people forget that even if we're a 1099 contractor with another company, that we can subcontract, because as a 1099, worker, our clients can't dictate how the work gets done. They can only dictate that we submit the work.

Caity- Yeah, for sure.

Wudan- Super smart. So how then did you go from having this one subcontractor to building Good Words out?

Caity- Yeah, so after I hired the subcontractor, that was really a test. It was really kind of a pilot to see, you know, one, did I enjoy that? Did I enjoy managing other people on projects? And two, was it financially feasible and viable? And it turned out that the answer to both of those questions was yes, certainly enough to keep going. So basically from there, the way I always made decisions, in particularly the early days of my business, was I would do a cost-benefit analysis, at least a quick one, for every decision that was kind of placed in front of me. And what I would consider was like, is this opportunity going to teach me something or give me an interesting experience? And two, is it going to make money? Is it going to be worth more than I pay for it? Than it costs, essentially. And again, if the answers to both of those questions were yes, I usually went for it. And what that meant was that I had a business that was profitable from day 1, which was really important to be able to bootstrap this business to a certain scale. And you know, it meant that I got to just kind of build the business over time. One thing that was a huge tenant for me in building my business was, I did it one step at a time. I didn't get too far out ahead of myself. I didn't, I didn't incorporate until the day a client required me to I didn't get, you know, $5 million insurance policies until I had an opportunity on the table in front of me that was gonna make more money than I paid to do that, you know? So it was, it was very much. It was very calculated in how I said yes to opportunities and why I said yes to them. So that was sort of how my decision making process went. And the result of that was that over the course of, particularly those first five years or so of the agency, like we just built it bit by bit, contract by contract, hire by hire, until at our largest, we had a team of about 20 writers. Yeah. But it all just happened one step at a time.

Wudan- Yeah, and I think that's an amazing way to keep yourself sane, right? Because otherwise, now that I'm in the middle of building my third company, which is a fact-checking agency, you know, my mindset is like, this is my third time building a house. And this time, I'm gonna do it right. And I'm gonna build the entire foundation and put in like, the two-by-fours and also drywall. And I'm spending so much time and investment in the foundation, which I do believe is really critical in having something that is sound for me to live in, for my business to live in, for the duration of its lifetime. But two, I think there is, especially when the business and agency is small, there's a push and pull of working in the business and then also on the business.

Caity- Definitely, for sure.

Wudan- So I know we've talked about this, about how there isn't, like, a guidebook on how to build an agency. But I'm curious at this point, what are the top three things you think people should ideally be doing when they're thinking about scaling from somebody as a freelancer to wanting to build an agency?

Caity- Oooo yeah. So top three things that I think you should do if you're thinking of doing this. Number one is absolutely know your labor laws as an agency and as a contractor. I am floored, and I know we've had conversations about this several times, but I am floored by the number of freelancers and also business owners and people who work in major corporations, who know nothing about their own rights as workers, and who particularly know nothing about the rights of contractors or people who are working on a contract-basis for a company. So for some context, you know, my agency, our writers are full-time employees for our agency, but we have a contract relationship with the companies that we work for. And the number of times that I've had to step in and intervene when those companies have started treating our people like employees, or started doing things that were kind of outside the lines. I have to do that all the time. And it's really, really important to be able to strongly advocate for yourself so that, so that you're paid properly, so that you're categorized properly, and so there's no sort of like legal gray area there. So that's always my number one. I think the my number two suggestion is: Know the basics of good sales. Like, know what your work is worth. Know what your service is worth, and how to talk about its value to a customer. And this is something that I had to learn over time. I didn't start out doing this as well as I do it today, but I often see people who accept lower rates than they should, or who don't know how to price their services, because they don't know how to think about it in terms of what value it's bringing to their customers bottom line. So I've improved over this, over the years, with this, over the years in my own business. But you know, I would highly encourage you: Try to do that from the very beginning. And also, I think, I don't think this is strictly necessary, necessarily, but if you have ideas or know how you want to run your agency, I think that's helpful. So there are a few different models, right? You know, there are agencies that only hire subcontractors. There are agencies who only hire salaried people. There are agencies that are very involved in the management of their consultants and contractors, and there are agencies that are 0% involved in the day to day management of those people's performance and careers. So you know. I think knowing the basics of what you want your agency to look like. I mean, you can always change your mind or make adjustments later on, but I think that is helpful.

Wudan- Yeah, that all makes a lot of sense. The pricing, I want to dig into a little more, because I've had a few experiences working as a freelance writer for different content marketing arms of otherwise editorial outfits, right? And it's so fascinating, because the project rates that trickle down to me are pretty competitive—

Caity- Mhm.

Wudan- —for my business, right? Like it meets my business needs, and then I'm just like, oh, but my managing editor has to get paid. Like, they're on staff, and like this project has to compensate, like the content studio for, like, all its overhead. And so I'm just curious to hear about how you priced, say, a project as a freelancer, if it was worth, like, 10k right? Like you charged 10k because that's what you needed to earn as a business. How does that change when you're kind of advocating for the same work product as an agency?

Caity- Yeah, I think one of the things I had to do was I had to adjust my thinking around this and eventually acknowledge that the agency provides other services on top of just the work that's getting done and the work and labor that the agency is providing is worth something. So I'll explain what I mean by that. So when you're an agency, as opposed to a freelancer, an agency is really taking on all of the labor law risk and compliance aspects of your employment, essentially. So whereas a freelancer is usually paid on a 1099, you know, you're just kind of like doing your work, and then you go on your merry way. For someone who works for an agency, your agency is actually doing a lot of work behind the scenes. They're doing a lot of sales. They're doing a lot of compliance work. They're doing a lot of often management and things like that. So the result is that when companies work with agencies, they usually get a more consistent working experience. They get a more consistent work product often, because a good agency will have, you know, training and standards and things like that that all of their people are following. But also, I mean, like an agency is a business that is taking on the risk of these business relationships, and that risk is worth something. So it often is invisible a little bit. And sometimes people will ask questions, well, like, why would I hire an agency when I could just hire a freelancer at X percentage of that price? And you know, sometimes the right answer is a freelancer, and sometimes the right answer is an agency, depending on the customer, the client, the needs. And you know what everybody needs from the arrangement.

Wudan- Yeah, yeah. And I think maybe we talked about this, but a common profit margin for the agency is to take an additional 40 to 60%

Caity- Yes, absolutely. That is something that I really had to, I think, as an agency founder, wrap my head around and do some of my own internal work on. Because I think when I was first starting my company, I was like, oh, any, any profit margin is good profit margin. I'll take it. And then as my agency grew, and the business had more needs that needed to be paid for, I was like, oh, no. Like, I really kind of undervalued this work. I now need to go back and make adjustments, and it took me a while to also wrap my head around, like no the business of the agency also needs to make money in order to be sustainable and survive and to provide, you know, the good service that your that your customers expect.

Wudan- For sure. So I'm really curious to hear about how your day-to-day has changed from early days of even the agency to perhaps, like, the last two years. It sounds like you're doing a lot of sales.

Caity- Yeah, that's, that's definitely—that's definitely true. So let's see. I would say in the early days, the biggest adjustment was—there was a point at which I had to transition full-time from doing some of the work and working on the projects with my writers to just managing them in the business. For me personally, that was a huge adjustment, and it took me a while. It took some work. So I actually ended up hiring a business coach to kind of help me out with that. Because, I mean, I became a writer, because I love doing the writing. I love that aspect of the job. And then management, entrepreneurship, business ownership, was a totally different thing that required me to really like grow as a person. So that was kind of big transition, number one. And then in the days when the agency was young and the agency was really small, like I said, you know, we got a lot of work from referrals. We got a lot of work from former colleagues or existing clients who would bring us in for more work and things like that. And that scaled us up pretty quickly. But then there is a certain point at which I think if you want your agency to continue to grow, you have to start actually doing outbound sales, which is, it's its own beast. It's its own thing. It comes, you know, with its own set of skills that you really have to master. So that has been the story of my life, particularly in the last year and a half or so. And I mean, I think it's worth stating as well that, like I work in the tech industry. The tech industry are our clients, and the tech industry has had a challenging time in the last couple of years. So running the agency in the boom times, when it was a gold rush, looked very different than running an agency when things are a little tougher, and you definitely have to have that sales acumen and be able to step into that sales role, particularly when things are a little tougher.

Wudan- Definitely. Yeah, it's a different, like, lead gen strategy, right?

Caity- Absolutely, yeah.

Wudan- Yes, yes. There's always the first tier, which is your direct contacts, and then afterwards, you're like, what else is out there? I still have to put myself out there. So yes, it's a lot of effort, for sure.

Caity- Totally. Yeah.

Wudan- I want to talk about what your process looks like for making big decisions about your business. And actually hearing, kind of, about how you were in San Francisco and working in startups, and seeing startups evolve and like, the lifetime of a business in that sense, helps you, yeah, I don't know, like, think about the lifetime of your own business.

Caity- Yeah, absolutely. So it's really interesting, because—I'm gonna start my answer to this question off by sort of musing about the nature of what most agencies are. I mean, like, we're on an episode of The Writers' Co-op right now, right? So, like, I assume most of the audience are writers, people who come from the writing industry, and you know, a lot of agencies that exist are, you know, based on writing careers, whether it's creative writing, journalism, technical writing, like we do, marketing, things like that. An agency is essentially, at least in my case—and I have met very few agency owners for whom this isn't the case—most agencies grow from their founders' own career and their founders' own skills, right? So, like, I was an individual person who basically—effectively, what my agency did, was it scaled up my reputation and my ability to do work for the clients that we serve. So an agency in its—it, by definition, almost, in many of these cases, is like a very personal business. An agency is very tied to the founders' own career. So I just want to I offer that, because I think when the rubber hits the road and running the business gets really hard sometimes, I think it can also feel very personal in, in the decision-making process. Every decision, every challenge, sort of can feel like a personal challenge or a personal problem. And the thing that helped me the most with that was being really, really clear about both my business's values and my personal values, and I separate them for a good reason, you know?

Wudan- Yeah

Caity- The, the business—my business completely changed when we decided to write down our business values. It gave us this really great framework for being able to make sustainable decisions when challenging things happened. So like, okay, a client is being really hard to work with. How do we make a decision about what to do in this in this situation? We would go directly to our values and say, like, well, you know, our values say that we are honest and we communicate about problems, so we're going to talk to them about it. Our values say that, you know, here are the things we're committed to, and here's, here are the things that we expect from the people that we work with. So I cannot overstate it was the most useful decision-making tool that we ever put into place in our business. And then secondly, I think it's also very important, especially if you're an individual founder. But I mean, I think this applies even if you start your agency with somebody else, like, know what your values are. Why are you doing this? Where does the agency fit into the rest of your life? That's been really important. Because actually, I'm, I'm sort of in this interesting place with my agency, where I'm actually working on an exit. I'm either going to be selling my agency soon or winding it down. And the tools that I really use to be able to make that decision—which is incredibly difficult. It's an incredibly difficult decision to make, right? Because, as I said, you know, this business was my first baby, essentially, that I grew out of my own career. But at a certain point, it became obvious that, like, you know, maybe running this particular business right now, at this phase in my life, was not in line with my personal values. So I think it's important to stay connected to your why for doing this. Because it's really easy for a business to kind of run away with you, if you let it. Like, in my case, for example, you know, like I scaled up my agency to—we're certainly not the biggest agency in the world, but I scaled it up to be about a $3 million a year business, which I never, ever dreamed that we would do. And it got very big. It got much bigger than I thought it ever would. And all of a sudden I had a lot to be responsible for, and a lot of other people who were a part of this ecosystem that I had built. So it can be very easy to just sort of like get sucked in and sucked down by the needs of the business, if you're not also focusing on your—on your personal needs and your personal life, separate from that of the business. So hopefully that helps. Hopefully that answers the question. But I think the Cliff Notes version is: Know your values and know where they're separate from your business's values.

Wudan- Yeah, for sure. What specifically was the moment that led you to think about winding down your business?

Caity- The market in the tech industry in particular, has been very different in the last couple of years. I do anticipate that it will change, and then it will come back at some point. But running the business in the last couple of years is a very, very different beast than running it in the first five years of its existence, for sure, just because the market's different. But I think that's an important thing to pay attention to, sometimes. Like, running any business—an agency is a business with business needs in a free market economy, right, if you're operating in the US. So like your, your market dictates in at least certain aspects, you know how successful you're going to be, and you need to be able to provide value to your business, to your customers, and also to yourself. You know, the business needs to support all of those things. So, you know, I would say that for me, when I made the decision, finally, that I was like, you know what? I think, I think it's time for something new. My decision came partially from that. I think the market has changed a little bit for our services. I think it's been a challenging couple of years. But also, going back to what I said earlier about an agency being a very personal business most of the time, you know, what do you do when you as the agency owner, are ready for a new challenge, right? Like, you know, I'm, I'm a human too. Like, I love learning new things. I love taking on new challenges. And I'm excited to, you know, do some things outside of this thing that I've built for the last seven years. And sometimes, that comes with the difficult decision of having to say, like, okay, I'm going to pass this off to somebody else to run, so that I can go continue to grow as a person and as an individual and maybe try some other things. So that's really kind of what took me personally to the decision to kind of change my relationship with my agency, whether that means selling it or whether that means winding it down. And I will also say that, like, by no means was this an easy decision to come to. It was—I thought about this for probably over a year, you know, like how I wanted to either sustain my agency or sustain my relationship with it, and whether I wanted to do that, and on what sort of time scale. And so it took a lot of soul searching. It's, it's definitely not an easy decision, but it's also, I think important. I think it's important, like I said earlier, as well, to not let your business run away with you. I mean, running my agency has been a lot of fun. I would totally tell anybody who wants to do it, you know, do it, try it out. It's absolutely worth doing. And we had an awesome run for seven years, right? I would do it all over again. I don't regret anything. But it's also like, you gotta know, you gotta know when it's time for you to do something else too.

Wudan- Yeah, listening to you talk about this, I just think about, I mean, sunk cost fallacy.

Caity- Yeah

Wudan- Right? It's like, it's so easy for us to be like, ugh well, this was my first real big company, and attach so much value to that, and make it such a big part of our identity. I mean, it's very easy to fall into all of those things, but I think being able to step back and also say, like, everything has a lifetime.

Caity- Mhm.

Wudan- Like humans do, businesses, startups in Silicon Valley absolutely do, right?

Caity- Absolutely, yeah.

Wudan- And so I think, like, yes, it's absolutely so challenging when the business is yours and it's so personal, but also just remembering that, like everything else, there's a beginning, middle and end, and sometimes it does make sense to figure out, you know, where you are there and like, what you want to do about it?

Caity- Yeah, and I think agencies as well are a really great way to get your feet wet in entrepreneurship.

Wudan- Mhm.

Caity- A lot of people that I know who've gone on to be serial entrepreneurs started as agency owners, whether or not they own their agencies now. You know, it can be a really great way to sort of take one step at a time into business ownership and see how you like it, and figure some things out, whether that's, you know, running payroll, or setting up an entity, or working on contracts, writing contracts and negotiating them, and things like that. So it can be a great business. I mean, period. And also can be a great way to, sort of like, see if you enjoy entrepreneurship as well. So, like, I can say, kind of as, as you said earlier about your three businesses. You know, I can say now that the next business I go into, I know 10,000 times more than I did starting Good Words now that I can take into the next phase of my career, no matter what that is, but certainly into entrepreneurship in the future. And I learned so many valuable lessons that I am excited to be able to apply, like, from day one in the next venture.

Wudan- Yeah, absolutely. Well, Caity, any last words for freelancers? Any advice who are thinking about scaling up to an agency?

Caity- Yeah, I mean, I think my, my top pieces of advice are a lot of what I've already said, but I'll just kind of sum, sum it up. You don't necessarily have to do everything at once. If you've got a clear vision for exactly where you want to take this thing and what you want it to look like in the long term. Then like, by all means, you know, just go for it. But also, it worked really well for me just to take things one step at a time and kind of respond to whatever challenges were in front of me as I was just getting started. So, you don't have to do everything at once, is kind of my piece of advice number one. I think piece of advice number two is: Tour network, especially as you're starting out, is absolutely critical. Take care of your connections. Take care of your network. Take care of your relationships with your former colleagues or your clients or the people that you work with, because those are the people who are going to vouch for you in the marketplace, and we're gonna, you know, help you build your reputation. And three, I'll say it again. I'll say it until I die. Know your labor laws and know your rights, because it's so important, and it can really, really help you, especially in negotiating for better contracts for you and your workers down the line. That's what I think I'd leave everybody with.

Wudan- Well, that is a great list to visit, revisit anytime ever. Caity, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure.

Caity- Of course. Thank you so much for having me.

Wudan- Thanks so much to Caity for coming on the show. You can learn more about Good Words at goodwords.io or follow Caity on LinkedIn. That'll be in our show notes. If you've loved this episode, be sure to subscribe to The Writers' Co-op. We've still got a few episodes this season that takes you behind the scenes of companies built by freelancers who dare to dream big. And please, check out our earlier episodes from this season. They're all really, really good. If you'd like to continue the conversation from this episode, Patreon members are already discussing it in our Slack channel, and you can join us. Sign up anytime at patreon.com/TWC, pod. Thank you so much for listening to The Writers' Co-op. This season is written, hosted and executive produced by me, Wudan Yan. The show's producer is Margaret Osborne, and our editor is Susan Valot.