All-In

My wife Alicia and I sat down and looked at the numbers. They weren’t pretty and we had a growing family, bills to pay, and feeling like we’d be stuck renting the rest of our lives. Working as a freelancer had previously been fun but it wasn’t in this moment for sure. What we thought could be the end became the very spark to ignite a new perspective and a belief that we could be successful…. if we made some changes of course.

Rewind to 2009-2011

My good buddy Mike knew I had begun learning website design and introduced me to WordPress. Mind blown! This was awesome. I couldn’t stop learning how to work with it and learn how to code all at the same time. Many nights after a long day at work you’d find me in our garage at our old townhome fumbling through a 500 page html, css, and javascript for dummies and trying to manually connect my WordPress configuration file to a database.

Each night I’d learn something new and it got to a point where I started getting asked if I could build websites for money. I thought, why not? Soon it got out that I was doing this and Mike, who ran a marketing agency at the time, reached out and we started freelancing with his company. Then, Mike’s friend Alan, who also owned an agency, reached out. I thought, this is so awesome, and it truly was! We’re still great friends to this day with both Mike and Alan and would not be where we are today without them. This led to us meeting even more agency owners and ultimately taking on our own direct clientele. At this point, this was what I did full-time, hopping back and forth between various jobs all day, doing the coffee shop workplace, and waiting around for the next opportunity to come knocking. And…. they did….. for about 3 years.

3 years into the freelance life I received some unfortunate news. One of the agencies we did business with would no longer be contracted by a major client they had. It was no foul on them, just the end-client bringing some work in-house. At this point I had been sensing change on the horizon already and this was the final confirmation it was happening…. whether I liked it or not.

Fast Forward to 2014-2015

As Alicia and I looked at the numbers we had to have a hard conversation and face the reality that we weren’t making enough money.

It was a moment to take in, realizing that we might need to fold and have me go get a full time job….. doing…… something. It also felt scary since I had a wife and children to provide for.

Sitting there in that reality it hit us. We didn’t need to just call it quits, but we did need to make some changes. First change, I needed to get some side jobs, and boy did I ever. I was knocking on family and friend doors asking if they had work. Thankfully my brother, who doesn’t like construction, had a laundry list of jobs. During that season I painted doors, fixed fences, fixed siding (somehow), and pretty much was available for hire with any opportunity that came my way. I was a few moments from delivering pizzas too! This was before DoorDash and other more modern side hustles.

The other big change was a huge mentality shift. We weren’t quitting our vision for our business, we just had to make some momentary adjustments so we could work towards our vision, just at a slower pace.

We decided to be All-In, even if it meant doing other things to keep the vision alive.

At the same time I realized our business mindset needed to change from me to we, which you can learn more about that in the link above here.

Over time, work picked back up and we were able to get me out of the side jobs, fully re-focused on building our business, going from Andrew Toohill freelancer to Toohill Consulting, which we’ll talk about in another article.

Every business goes through hard times. It’s what we do in those hard times, how we handle disappointment, that makes or breaks us. It’s the adjustments and sacrifices we are willing to make. It’s the people around us that, may have been speaking all along, that we actually start to listen to and receive counsel and help from.

Are you All-In? It’s not always pretty. What adjustments do you need to make to get unstuck from your current predicament? You might just be one decision away from a huge step forward whether you realize it or not.