What I’ve Been Up to Since Season 1
Welcome back to Messy In the Middle! I am so excited to be bringing this show back for season two. Today’s episode is going to be a super casual catch up to give you a sneak peek behind the curtain at what I’ve been up to since season one and what you can expect from season two.
So if you’re new here, if we haven’t met yet, my name is Haley- I am a copywriter for businesses who do good. I say marketing that feels good for people who do good! My whole mission is to really help these people create copy that converts and copy that can sell, but do it in an ethical way that doesn’t feel skeezy or make their ideal clients feel uncomfortable. In addition to that, I also have a brand called Propegy, where we help those same value based service providers thrive on LinkedIn.
As you’re listening to this, (if you’re listening around when it comes out), we’re getting ready to do a launch of our signature program, Level Up with LinkedIn Lead Gen. We are calling it Level Up Live because instead of an evergreen program, we will be doing live workshops every single week with opportunities for feedback and coaching. There’s also our membership called Thought Leaders Collective, which is all about helping you become a thought leader onLinkedIn. We have weekly content prompts that we send out and have a little community over on LinkedIn. If you’re interested in learning more about either one of those, you can send me a DM on Instagram over at Propegy.
What I’ve Been Up To
Since we last spoke, I have done a lot! I recorded most of season one in the end of 2021 or early 2022, so it’s been awhile since I’ve picked up the microphone and talked to you guys about what’s going on. In the beginning of this year, I started out working for another company for the first time in several years. I was doing a maternity leave position, working as a digital marketing manager. A big reason I took this position was, first of all, it was part time, so Iwas still able to work on property stuff and work on some copy stuff for clients. Plus, I really wanted to see if I would like having a real job. I’ve worked in a lot of not-so-great work environments, and I wanted to give myself a chance to test out a really positive working environment. This company had a great culture and I wanted to see if I would like just having a normal nine to five.
Spoiler alert, I did not.
I loved the team that I was working with, I loved the culture of the company, I loved everything about it. If I ever wanted to work fulltime for someone, I would absolutely want to work at this company. But I think being on someone else’s schedule and someone else’s timeline just didn’t feel good to me as my little entrepreneurial self. It was a great experiment, it was a great time. I learned a lot. But I think the next time I start toying with the idea of getting a full time job, I’m going to need to refer back to this episode and talk myself off of that ledge.
If I didn’t get a full time job, what did I do once that position ended? Well, as I was getting ready to end that position, I decided to work with a graphic designer for the first time to design my brand. So if you head over to haleyejohnson.com, you can see my new branding, you can see my new website and you can hire Steph Corrigan from Steph Corrigan Design to make that happen for you as well. We have an interview with Steph actually later on this season so you can get to know her a little bit better then!
What’s Happening On My Website?
So what am I doing over at haleyejohnson.com? I mentioned earlier that I say I do marketing that feels good for people who do good. And we do this primarily through Marketing Roadmap VIP Days and Road Trip Intensive. What a Marketing Roadmap VIP Day does is it takes the concept of a funnel and looks at it through a more ethical, kind, and informed lens. We think about how our ideal clients are coming to discover your company or discover your brand and what is the process of getting them to go through the entire customer journey.
Do they know they have a problem? Do they know what the solution is? Do they know that you offer that solution? Thinking through all of those things and how we can create the most helpful and effective strategy without being pushy.
A Marketing Roadmap VIP Day puts together the entire map and the Marketing Road Trip Intensive is a completely done for you service where we build out that roadmap. We write all of the copy, we get all of the design taken care of, and then depending on the tech you use, we also implement it. Things included in that are opt in creation. We do quizzes, we do case studies, we put together the sequences that follow up from those opt in to make sure that people are being served and being sold to.
I’ve also been playing around with doing general day rates and half day rates for copy which has been a lot of fun too! I’m someone who works really well under pressure and with tight deadlines. So, knowing that I have one day and the only thing I’m dedicated to that day is someone’s copy project is a really great way for me to get in the zone, get things done and not get so distracted in the little details of things. Because if there’s one thing I will do, it is accidentally give myself a ton of busy work that makes the project way more complicated than it needs to be. And I find that doing day rates doesn’t really allow for that.
Finally, my last personal update is that I’ve been really experimenting with my ideal schedule since becoming an entrepreneur. Pretty much as soon as I graduated college, I have tried to force myself to work in that nine to five mentality. I’ve tried to kind of flip the switch the other way and give myself so much freedom and so much flexibility and try to have a four day work week or have a shorter work day. But I was still always creating these schedules based on what I thought I was supposed to do. Like I’m supposed to not work on weekends so my schedule has to allow for me to get everything done so that I don’t work on weekends. Or I’m an entrepreneur, why would I work a 40-hours work week if I don’t have to?
On the flip side, I’m an entrepreneur. I need to hustle, I’m not doing as well as I could or I’m not reaching my goals because I’m not working hard enough. But all of those things are really based on my perception of other people’s perception of me. And realistically, nobody knows how I’m spending my time. And honestly, nobody cares how I’m spending my time. So I’ve been spending a lot of time since leaving that maternity leave position really figuring out what I want my schedule to look like.
For the past quarter or so, I’ve been really working on time blocking. I have my day set out as nine to four, I have my morning focus time, I have my afternoon focus time,and then I’m putting in a solid hour break in the middle of the day for lunch. Because something I’m fantastic at doing is forgetting to feed myself. And it’s been great to help me not feel the pressure to keep working when I’m done.
What Does That Mean?
So on Mondays, for example, my morning is dedicated to marketing and admin. It’s when I meet with my marketing assistant, we plan out the week, when I meet with my friend Meg and we do a little budgeting session to make sure our bookkeeping is spick and span, and when I get all of that, like, beginning of the week admin stuff taken care of. And then my afternoon on Mondays is dedicated to kick off calls, sales calls, client calls. Anything that needs to be facing other people is what I do on Monday afternoons.
In the past, I have kind of forced myself to keep working all the way until the end of the day on Mondays, even if I didn’t have anything left to do. But with time blocking, I know that if I don’t have any calls on Monday afternoon, I don’t have to work. I can if I want to, but I don’t have to. Taking that expectation away from myself has been really nice and really freeing and relaxing. Because that’s something that I never really let myself do before. I was always tip tapping away.
With that schedule, I have two full days completely blocked out for client work. That’s when I can do those VIP days or those day rates,and then everything else has its own spot. I don’t want to dive too much into what my weekly breakdown looks like because I actually am in the midst of changing it. Over these past few months, I’ve really enjoyed having time blocking, but I’ve also had long weekends where I’m going away somewhere for random things that pop up that don’t fit in with the time blocks I’ve created for myself. Then I kind of spiral a little bit because things aren’t going the way they’re supposed to.
I’m thinking about starting August, doing A weeks and B weeks. So still incorporating some of that time blocking nature, but having client facing weeks and internal weeks. I tend to get better focus if I’m sticking to one thing all the time. And so if I’m creating a new funnel for myself and I’m not going to finish that during just my Monday morning marketing time, it’ll be hanging over my head for the rest of the week. I want to experiment with giving myself some internal time and some external time.
I’m also considering the idea of working every day. I’m someone who gets really into a routine and gets really into a consistent schedule. I feel so much better during the week when I Wake up and I get started working and I stop when I feel like being done. I’m also experimenting with kind of the opposite of a four day work week and shortening my work day and extending the number of days that I work. Obviously, I can still take time off. I can still choose not to work on a Sunday if I don’t want to. But I think just we have to train ourselves to not work on weekends as entrepreneurs and train ourselves to not stay up too late. It’s all a work in progress!
What’s Next?
So what’s next? What’s next for Propegy? What’s next for Haley? What is next for season two of Messy in the Middle? We have some awesome interviews coming up! I’ve been on an interview role lately, and the interview episodes are going to be quite a bit longer than they were last season. Last season, we had some pretty quick 20-25minutes interviews. This season, we have been hanging out and chatting a bit longer. We’re getting closer to that 45 minutes and hour mark.
Every other week you guys can expect an interview with a different entrepreneur. We have everyone from SEO and Pinterest strategists, graphic designers, other copywriters, and a podcast manager. That’s everyone I have lined up so far. So, if you’re interested in being interviewed on season two of Messy in the Middle, send an email to haley@thepropegy.com and send me your pitch because I’d love to hear it!
We’ll also be having some more educational solo episodes. The next few will be about LinkedIn because we are launching Level Up Live, and then we will dive into some brand strategy. We’re going to revisit the marketing roadmap because I found a lot more clarity about what it is than I had when I recorded that first episode back in January or February.
I’m so excited to be able to share it with you! I had a lot of fun creating it and cheers to another season. Thanks for hanging out with me!
