‘Well when you describe a job that way, now I’m really certain I want to quit my job for good,’ Melissa laughed.

‘I’ve done what you said, and collected the marketing that other photographers have sent the office and I’ve got my camera and lenses. But I’m itching to just get started.

‘The thing is, I’ll only have a couple of shoots a week at first, based on work I’ll probably get from this office. I know I should probably try to build my business part-time until I can replace my income, but I’m not sure how I could do that, even if I wanted to. Agents are going to want to book me during the week for starters, not just the weekend.

‘While I have my job I can’t really start taking bookings — I could try to book agents on a Saturday, but what if they want another day? You said that I’ve got to think of what the customer wants, not just what would suit me best, and I know agents. Those guys like to leave everything to the last minute and do it in a rush. Besides, weekends are a time they’ve got a lot else on their plate.’

Melissa was asking me to ‘give her permission’ to quit her job without any real ‘security’, so she could be free to really commit to her new business idea, and make it work. I’d spoken with Melissa over the previous few months as the GFC was unfolding. I’d shared my concerns about the downturn and the hard times that would follow the initial fireworks and headlines that were only just reaching our shores.

While it sounds insane to think about starting a business going into a predictable downturn, especially one in real estate, it’s not as crazy as you’d first think. In fact, starting a business in a downturn may be the safer thing to do. You can’t control your boss’s decision to cut staff.

Besides, some of the biggest companies around today all got their start in the Great Depression. While downturns hit the average family pretty hard, they’re also a time when big, established companies that are bloated and bureaucratic get hit hard too. After the prolonged, debt-fuelled economic summer we’d been in for decades, there were many companies that were getting away with inefficiencies that would kill them in leaner times. Melissa’s previous workplace had its own examples of people hired for dubious reasons and with inflated job titles. In a downturn the employee gets fired, while the small, lean start-up that is free of bureaucracy can respond quickly and grow, often taking over areas that bigger companies had dominated for years. Even in the real estate industry people will always need to sell houses, and when times get tougher there may be even more call for agents to put effort into marketing properties that could have more or less sold themselves in the past.

… some of the biggest companies around today all got their start in the Great Depression.

I’d decided to mentor Melissa in the beginning because I sensed that she was someone who, like me, put an abnormally strong value on freedom. Whether it was her nature, or all the stuff I was filling her head with, I knew she was right.

After all, it was what I had done, and if I truly believed that you needed to be free first if you wanted to be rich, then it was the only advice I could truthfully give her.

Of course the ‘responsible’ advice would be to build your business in your spare time until you can make enough to quit your job. But think about what that advice is asking people to do. Someone who works, say, five days a week for a $50 000 salary is being asked to create something that earns them at least $50 000 a year — in their spare time!

They’re being asked to put less effort — two days a week — into something to replace the five days a week they devote to their job. Many people put years into studying for their nine to five jobs, as well as years of experience into the jobs themselves. But for a business — just put in your spare time!

That’s not ‘safe’ advice; it’s setting you up to fail.

When you’ve spent the majority of the hours of the majority of the days in the week working your job, it can be hard to summon up the energy on the only days you have off to invest in a business that, in the beginning stages at least, may not be making much, if anything, compared to your full-time salary. In effect, trying to start a business in your spare time can trap you in the beginning stages indefinitely: endlessly planning, until seeing little result, it becomes easier to give in before you’ve even started. At least you’ll get your weekends back!

I remember watching one of those entrepreneur incubator type shows — you know, the ones with weird names like ‘Shark Tank’, ‘Lion’s Den’, ‘Bear Pit’ (I’m not sure about the last one): programs where a panel of successful entrepreneurs listen to proposals by hopeful guests who are looking for funding for their business ideas.

Anyway, there was a pair of hopeful young guys who came on the show, both had pretty good jobs with decent income and they had a business that they hoped the gurus would back. In the background clip they showed the guys and their wives hanging out, socialising together at restaurants. When questioned, one of them admitted that he couldn’t devote too much time to the business yet because it wasn’t making enough money to ‘pay his salary’, but once the business could pay him what he ‘needed’ to maintain his nice lifestyle, then he’d totally commit to it.

Well the gurus gave him an earful: ‘Why would we invest our money in your business when you won’t even invest your time in it?’

I kind of felt sorry for them. They were only doing what I’ve seen so many other people do, who have been conditioned by a lifetime living in the Income Trap. And that is fall for the big win temptation. Like buying a lotto ticket (where you put out a small amount of money you can afford to lose, in the hope of winning enough money that you never have to work again), they were hoping that by putting a small amount of time that they could afford to lose (their weekends and so on) into their business idea, they might one day strike it rich. In the meantime they could stay comfortably in the Income Trap, spending as much as they earned, confident that the pay cheque would always be there. But as most people know, buying lotto tickets isn’t exactly a sure-fire way to become financially free.

… buying lotto tickets isn’t exactly a sure-fire way to become financially free.

The gurus on the show went on to humble-brag about how much they had sacrificed in the beginning, going sometimes years without drawing an income from the business, while living extremely frugally.

But you don’t need to start a business with no foreseeable income and be driven to grow it into the next big sensation. Most people who do that don’t succeed, and besides, trying to create ‘the next big thing’ can be a consequence of valuing your ego, of wanting to be a ‘big businessman’, instead of being driven by a motivation to be free.

Women often find this trap easier to avoid than men, perhaps because men have more ego …

Having survived the property correction, converted his home into an investment, increased his cashflow and avoided shackling himself to massive debt, Andrew had remained free enough and flexible enough to finally commit to the entrepreneurial path he’d always wanted to pursue.

But that’s where his true values began to make themselves felt. Rather than start a business that could free him from his job, he, along with three other friends who worked for the same company, decided to go into business together making themselves directors of their new company: four directors, incorporation, big meetings, paying employees — all while still working their jobs.

Right from the beginning it became clear that it was more important to them to feel big and successful — while sharing the risk of failure with many others — than it was to be free.

Meanwhile, his girlfriend at the time, Julia, had a much simpler motivation. She wasn’t driven by ego to create the ‘next big thing’. She was simply sick of working for her boss and dreamed of being free.

Being unburdened by ego, it didn’t take much for her to quit her job and start up a mobile hairdressing business. She ended up leaving her job well before Andrew, despite him dreaming of doing so for many years before she did. At first she earned a little less than she did in the salon, but it didn’t take long before she had replaced, then exceeded, her former income, and now with the freedom of being her own boss too.

Andrew’s business, on the other hand, didn’t fare so well. The shame was, it was a good idea for a business. It was a service-based business delivering training to doctors, and as their rush of early bookings made clear, it could have replaced the income of any one or even two of them in a short space of time. What’s more, the business took advantage of skills that the guys were already using in their jobs, which they were still hanging onto while trying to do their new business on the side. Unfortunately though, this failure to commit to the business created a conflict of interest which, when it finally came to light, resulted in multiple firings and strife that eventually pulled the company apart.

Had they trusted in the power of growth and focused on freeing themselves first, they could have started out doing some of the training services themselves, instead of rushing to hire employees. Facebook and Google all started with the founders doing the early coding personally. This would have freed them from the need to cling to their jobs, and they could have used that freedom to eventually systemise the business and hire others when the time was right.

In case you are thinking that I’m advising you to choose working in a small business versus striking it rich in a big one, think again. One of the richest men in the city of Brisbane was a man called Stefan Ackerie.

Stefan started out running his own hairdressing business, like Julia, and eventually built an empire of salons and haircare products. He ended up owning million-dollar racing boats, and even built a tower that shone a light around the city. That’s how starting a business that frees you first allows you to have the time — and get the feedback from the market — to really grow. Which is better than trying to create a big business in your spare time while your job takes up all your attention (as well as the best hours of the majority of the days of the week).

Part of the reason that people cling to their jobs while trying to make a business work part-time, might be that having lived our lives in the Income Trap, earning money in straight lines, it can be hard to trust in the power of growth, particularly in a concept I call ‘Freedom Escape Velocity’.

The power of growth: Freedom Escape Velocity

What I’ve been describing so far in this chapter is a concept I’ve come to call ‘Freedom Escape Velocity’.

In teaching others, I’d noticed that people who didn’t seem to value their freedom as much as I did were always looking for a way to become totally financially free at once — or they wouldn’t bother to do anything at all. If they couldn’t buy back all their time in one big hit, like winning the lotto, they couldn’t get motivated to buy back any time at all.

In contrast to this, Freedom First says that you need to buy back your time, if you want to buy back more time. It’s worth buying yourself even a little time back. Why is that?

When you’re working a job, you have very little time to call your own, in which to be creative, to invent and to grow. And I’m not just talking about hours in the day, but rather mental time too. How often do you come home at the end of a work day and just want to relax and ‘veg out’? You may still have a few hours left on the clock, but your mental tank is empty. Working a job, you end up giving the best hours, of the best days, of the best years of your life to someone else.

Thinking about this, I was reading up on ageing research when I came across a researcher who was lecturing on an interesting concept he called ‘longevity escape velocity’. He was borrowing a term from aerospace engineering, escape velocity being the speed you need to get to, to escape the pull of Earth’s gravity.

Most people, when they hear that actual research into fighting ageing is being conducted, and that some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley are investing heavily into it, are quite surprised. Research to fight diseases seems normal, but ageing has always seemed inevitable. With all the hype out there, nobody is getting visibly younger. And that’s what the researcher noticed: most people feel that unless researchers can offer a complete solution, unless someone proposes a way to stop ageing or even reverse it, there is not much point looking into fighting ageing per se at all.

What the researcher noted was that people were failing to understand the power of growth, which we talked about earlier — the power for small changes to add up. Even if research couldn’t yet reverse ageing, or halt it in its tracks, if it could at least delay the point at which we start to suffer the effects of ageing, then it could buy us time to find a better solution. Longevity escape velocity, as he called it, was the point at which ageing research gained us more life than we were losing.

So Freedom Escape Velocity can be thought of as the point at which your productive efforts are buying you back more time than they cost you. What this means is that you don’t need to totally replace your income, or create enough wealth to buy back all of your time before you quit your job, retire or start something new.

With, say, six months’ savings, any business you start, or investment you make, doesn’t have to replace your income straight away. As long as you start something that brings in some money — in bookings or sales or profits — that early money is adding time onto the end of your freedom window (the amount of time you can survive without a job); instead of having six months of living expenses, you’ll have six months plus one day extra the first time you make a sale.

Even when David had excitedly gotten off the phone after making that first booking, he still wasn’t convinced he’d made the right decision. After only one sale he couldn’t see how he could live off it: ‘it’s only one sale’.

But I reassured him that despite the urgency he felt the money wasn’t important — even though every fibre of his being was telling him it was — the process was what was important.

At first, you may spend two or three days or even a week getting that first day of extra freedom, but as soon as you start to buy back some time you’ve started on an exponential path. If, in that first week, you only make enough money to buy back one day of living expenses, and in the second week you earn enough to cover two days of living expenses and so on, you’re on your way to achieving Freedom Escape Velocity. You haven’t escaped orbit yet, but each week you are expanding your freedom window. At some point you’ll be buying back more than one day’s freedom each and every day, and at that point, you’ve achieved Freedom Escape Velocity.

Because your earnings are coming in in a non-linear way, you probably won’t even realise when you’ve passed that point at first. People are terrible at predicting growth, especially if they’ve been stuck in a trap that reinforces straight line thinking.

The first month you’ve made only two weeks of living expenses — bummer, so you send out some marketing. The next month you make five weeks’ worth of living expenses; well that could have just been a good month right? The next month you spend four weeks but only make enough to add three and a half weeks of freedom onto your window. The following month it’s six weeks of time you’ve bought back.

As a result of this irregular pattern of income, saving money can actually become easier too. This was something David shared with me early on: by creating wealth, instead of just earning a salary he began to see money as an input, and not just an output. Because he wasn’t directly living off his sales (at first he was living off his savings) it was easier to see the money he made from that first sale as a seed he could plant by reinvesting it in his business.

When you earn a salary, you need to budget so you can save a little extra a week for a ‘future you’ 30 years from now. However, the authors of the book The Millionaire Next Door found that almost half of all millionaires don’t use a fixed budget and instead operate on a perceived scarcity principle — what I prefer to think of as Perceived Income Level Lag, (or PILL: would you like to take a pill that meant you didn’t have to budget?).

Basically, by being free of the Income Trap, those millionaires, naturally and without effort, acted as if their income was lower than it was. How?

Well, when people live pay cheque to pay cheque, they do it largely subconsciously: they don’t spend all their money at the beginning of the month, then starve for the rest of the month, nor do they get to the end of the month with money left and just spend it all on the last day. They tend to subconsciously ‘estimate’ their income and spend right up to it, sometimes running out a few days early or sometimes blowing what’s left at the end of the month. It’s easy to accommodate to what you ‘can’ spend when you live in the Income Trap, earning the same money each month, which is how people with vastly different incomes and expenses can all end up equally broke at the end of the month!

When you are growing, your perceived income level is on a ‘lag’.

But in the example given above of the first few months in business, you can see that month to month your income was variable, which straight away helps you not to accommodate to it as easily. But on top of that, on average, the income was increasing. That means that each month if you project your earnings forward based on the last month, you’ll actually be earning more than you expected. Remember from the diagram above that when things are growing our tendency to think in straight lines means we underestimate them.

So, when you are growing, your perceived income level is on a ‘lag’. Most years I have no idea how much money I have made that year until I do my tax. Because of this uncertainty, my brain seems to ‘assume’ an average income that I find it easy to live within. This is actually the upside to the problem of the human brain being terrible at projecting forward growth. When you are free of the Income Trap you can use that to your advantage, to live within your means without the restriction of a budget!

Finally, Freedom Escape Velocity is so powerful because the freer you get, the easier it is to become more and more free. For one thing, you have more time, but the nature of freedom is that it gives you more choices, so you have more time and more options too.

Provided you choose a business that makes you some money now, or an investment strategy that pays you up front, Freedom Escape Velocity means that you:

• can start with less money than you think
• can start sooner
• don’t have to have all the answers at first.

I’ve met some retirees who only really started investing once they had quit work, because they never had the time to do it before. But after waiting their whole lives to buy back all of their time, they’re finding that all it took was enough time to find the first deal and complete it. They could have retired years earlier.

What a waste of time!

The secret of happiness is freedom … and the secret of freedom is courage.

Thucydides

‘Okay, I’ve done it. I’ve quit my job.’

‘How did it go?’ I enquired.

‘Pretty good actually. The boss took it better than I expected. He said he was sorry to see me go and was pretty keen to continue to contract the office’s photography shoots out to me too. It’ll save them a bunch of money. I think you were right about the property correction putting a strain on businesses with bigger payrolls. Not that there has been much of a correction here yet.’

‘That’s great. So are you ready? The next few weeks are going to be some of the most memorable, scary and exciting weeks of your life.

‘You know when you go on a two-week holiday and years later you still remember all the high points of your holiday and none of the stress … long after the other 50 weeks in that particular year have faded in memory? That’s what this period of time will be like. Really living, not just going through the motions. Humans are meant to work, and create and grow, and you’re certainly going to be growing!’

‘That sounds ominous!’ Melissa laughed.

‘Not at all,’ I reassured her.

‘You’ve gotten free — now you’ve got something to lose. You’ll find the motivation takes care of itself.’

‘Oh I’m not worried about motivation; I’ve got so much to do!’ she replied.

‘Well since I got you into this, I’ll give you a hand to get started.’

So we sat down and made a list of all the things Melissa would need to do to get started.

Some of the things were pretty routine: think of a business name and register it. Open a bank account. Print some business cards.

Other things seemed more daunting: putting up a website and coming up with a plan on how to market, what to offer and how to price her services.

Some of those things could have been done while she was still safe and secure in her job, and I’d discussed this with Melissa, but she’d been adamant that it’d be easier to just start and throw herself into it. Creating a website was something in particular that she felt she’d never get her head around learning to do, if there wasn’t some urgency to it.

And she was right. She had a bit of a flair for design, which is not too surprising for a photographer I guess, and had even started a graphic design course online, but never got around to finishing it. Sometimes the best education is the one you have to teach yourself, to achieve a concrete real-life goal that has some urgency to it.

Sometimes the best education is the one you have to teach yourself, to achieve a concrete real-life goal that has some urgency to it.

But before she started on the website, we needed to decide what she’d offer and what she’d charge for it. We looked at what other photographers were charging, and it ranged all the way from ‘cheap’ to ‘premium’. Melissa’s instinct was to come in towards the low end, which is quite common with new business owners, but I reminded her that she wasn’t a commodity business. A commodity business is one where the product you sell is identical to every other product, and therefore the only thing you can compete on is price. Petrol is a commodity, and people seem particularly sensitive to price, often going miles out of their way to save a few cents.

Looking at other photographers it was clear that not all photography was equal either — the quality ranged as much as the prices did. Melissa’s experience in real estate photography combined with the decision to be a specialist, not a generalist, meant that she could realistically price her services higher than she could if real estate photography was just a sideline for her.

Of course, price doesn’t always reflect quality, and the most expensive photographers were not automatically producing the highest quality photos. Instead, perhaps they offered a superior service, or positioned themselves more effectively. Which brought us to the question of how exactly Melissa would market herself.

Melissa showed me the marketing she’d collected from other photographers while working at her old job. One immediate thing that jumped out was the average quality — terrible. ‘My name is Bob and I take photos.’ That’s nice Bob, but why should I care?

We learned in part II that you want to be free to get in touch with the market. And the Freedom First Wealth Creation Formula taught us that while you should do what you love, you need to find a way to also do what other people will value.

So many businesses don’t think in terms of what their market wants. People hate marketing because they feel they are asking others to give them something. But that’s a result of selfish thinking — thinking of the work you want to get, instead of what you can offer. I remember a while back a board game I loved from the 1980s was re-released, but they didn’t spend much on marketing and so I didn’t hear about it. It quickly sold out and now copies sell for a fortune second hand on eBay. I wish I had been marketed to when the product was first re-released! You’ve got to stop thinking of what you want and see marketing as a way to give people what they want.

So many businesses don’t think in terms of what their market wants.

So the first important question I asked Melissa was, ‘Who are your customers?’

Again, you’d be surprised by how many businesses can’t answer that. Melissa would be photographing people’s homes to help them sell their properties. But in most cases, the homeowner wouldn’t be her customer, the real estate agent would.

So the question became: what do agents value?

Most people would say ‘getting the sale’, but as Melissa explained to me, that’s not really true. Most agents care more about getting the listing. They call themselves sales agents and they get paid when properties sell, but many of them are more concerned with selling the homeowner on listing with them in the first place and letting the sales process take care of itself, to an extent, after that. The agent comes to your house personally to get you to list, but often it’s their assistant who they then send out to do the open houses on the weekend.

Melissa walked me through the standard listing pitch as it is for an agent. Many agencies don’t just want to secure a listing: anyone could convince people to simply list their house for an unrealistically high price to see if someone will bite, when it costs the homeowner nothing to list. Then the agent and agency have to spend time and money marketing a house that the owner may not even really want to sell.

So, agents often want to secure some investment in the sales process from owners as well as the listing, which means not only selling the homeowner on the agent’s ability to sell their home, but selling them on the need to invest in some marketing too.

Generally, the tools for doing that are pretty boring. The agent can come armed with facts and figures about how much a certain ad costs and how many extra enquiries that ad might generate.

Boring.

But talking about the process gave me an idea for how Melissa could help the agents.

What if, instead of simply dropping flyers at real estate offices advertising Melissa’s business, we created something that the agents might actually value? What if we created a sales pack the agents could use in their listing appointments with potential home owners?

We started brainstorming and came up with a glossy A4 folder with handout leaflets the agents could use to help convince an owner to invest in marketing their property. Instead of boring owners with dry statistics about ads, they could hand owners a colour brochure that showed in images, not numbers, how real estate photography could help sell their house.

Included were examples with before and after photos showing the same property with photos taken by agents/owners, versus photos taken with skill by a photographer with wide-angle lenses, photographed at dusk and professionally edited.

Along with the photos, we included a fact sheet that the agents could use in their presentations, highlighting research done by online property listing sites about the shift towards online marketing and how photos online are now often the first impression many people get of a property. We also included a guide for owners on how to best prepare their house to be photographed professionally. (Apparently, having lived in their homes for many years people collect a lot of ‘stuff’ that they simply stop seeing, that can be hidden to make a room look better in photos.)

I suggested we should include in each ‘kit’ a little fact sheet about Melissa and her experience with both marketing and photography in real estate, as well as a call to action.

‘Can you write that bit?’ Melissa asked. ‘I’d feel weird talking about myself.’

Believe it or not, there was a time when not everyone was obsessed with taking selfies and sharing their innermost thoughts with the world on Instagram or Facebook. So, as we put the finishing touches on the kits, I agreed to write up Melissa’s bio and she got to work on her website.

The first week of Melissa’s freedom was spent immersed in online tutorials and YouTube videos learning to build herself a website. YouTube is an awesome resource for learning practical skills they don’t teach at school.

Back then it was a sweet spot (or sour spot?) in time where websites were becoming pretty necessary to have for businesses, but there weren’t the many options that there are today for simple DIY ‘template’ websites, and website designers were still charging a fortune. So Melissa knuckled down and in 10 days built herself a website from scratch, breaking only twice to do shoots for agents at her old office. I was impressed.

Melissa decided that to start with, she’d offer a few different options: a regular shoot, a small unit shoot that would be cheaper and include fewer photos, and a premium dusk shoot. There are only so many dusks available a week. Dusk is the best time of day by far for real estate photography and these shoots often take a lot longer, involve more photos and more time editing in Photoshop afterwards, which justified the price.

… you are never going to know exactly what the market wants until you ask it.

Finally, there were the ‘add-ons’: floor plans and aerial shoots. Floor plans were easy enough to figure out, and easier to do once Melissa realised you could use a laser distance measurer instead of a tape measure. But aerial shoots were another matter. Some other photography franchises had special vans with extendable rooftop ladders that they used for aerial shots. Other photographers who had a lot of work contracted the shoots out to local light aircraft pilots, often doing several properties in the one flight. We looked into this option, but starting out with a small volume would mean that the cost to contract out these shoots would be sky high (sorry).

And besides, you are never going to know exactly what the market wants until you ask it. So, there was no real way to know how much demand there would be for aerial shoots until Melissa got out there and started booking shoots. Would the ability to do aerial shoots be something that people would see as a ‘make or break’ service for a real estate photographer? It seemed crazy to invest in a ‘truck with ladder’ setup, which would cost tens of thousands of dollars, or a drone — drones were pretty new back then and were prohibitively expensive — when Melissa had been so frugal up to that point in starting her business.

So Melissa decided that for now she’d pass on the aerial shoots as an option, at least in the beginning, which turned out to be a good decision.

In the beginning, it can be tempting to throw money at buying the most expensive equipment in an attempt to position yourself as ‘the premium brand’ in your market, but while you want to be in a branded business, not a commodity business, trying to buy your way to the top at the start rather than earn your way there, is a sure way to go broke. No matter how much you spend to be the ‘best’ right out of the gate, you can’t force people to buy your product and pay you premium prices (especially if you haven’t established relationships). Nor can you avoid the need to market yourself — which is why I think a lot of people are tempted to go down this road in the first place. You want to start a business that frees you, and keeps you in touch with the market long enough for it to tell you what it values, and then set about delivering that value to your customers better than anyone else.

As we finished up the kits and the website, Melissa had to decide on how exactly she was going to market her business. We’d created a ‘product’ in the marketing kits that might be of actual value to agents, certainly compared to a random flier stuck under an office’s door. Would we just mail them out to agents and hope that they’d contact Melissa?

Since we had something of value to offer, I encouraged her to ask for something in exchange: perhaps we could cold call the agents and offer them the kits in person?

‘Cold call them? No way!’

‘I thought you’d say that,’ I laughed. ‘So what are you comfortable with? When have you promoted yourself before?’ I asked.

‘Well, when I did job interviews I guess?’ Melissa replied, after a pause.

‘Absolutely! Like we said before about “being a business already”: you’ve already done sales and marketing! Marketing is like sending out your resume, and a job interview is like face-to-face sales — harder in some ways.

‘You told me that you found job interviews easy to do, right? Would you be comfortable meeting with these agents in person to give them the free kits and introduce yourself, maybe over a coffee?’

‘Sure I could do that. But how do we get the appointments? I don’t want to cold call them,’ Melissa asserted.

‘You’ve saved a lot of money making your own website, why don’t we outsource the phone calls? I know a top-gun sales guy who could spend a couple of days hitting the phones for you if we put together a list and a script. It’s a soft sell — you’re actually offering them something in exchange for meeting you.’

‘Alright,’ Melissa agreed. ‘I’d rather pay someone to do that!’

I’m all for people starting a business frugally rather than going into debt, but you don’t have to do everything yourself. Do what you are comfortable with, and find a way to get around what you are not.

So, Melissa got to work putting together a list of all the agents in her area and all the surrounding suburbs that she could conceivably do shoots in, and put together a short phone script as well.

The phone calls went well: agents are, by nature, gregarious people and many were happy to meet with Melissa over coffee.

Most were quite impressed that she had gone to the effort of creating something of value for them, instead of just spamming their offices with emails or flyers. When dealing with other businesses, the relationship is as important as the product, and going to the effort to meet with them in person created a good impression.

You don’t have to do everything yourself.

In fact the phone calls were going so well that one agent wanted Melissa to come out and do a presentation for the whole office.

I thought that sounded like a great idea: if the boss invited Melissa to speak to all the agents they’d be more likely to book her with his endorsement.

But Melissa disagreed. The thought of presenting to a room full of people terrified her. I’d probably find talking to a room full of people easier than meeting with them all one on one. But I forget that I’m probably weird that way.

So I reassured her that even though the presentation might be a great opportunity, she was in her own business now — which meant she was free to do whatever she was comfortable with, including choose what work she wanted to do, or not do. In a job you only have one customer, your boss, but in a business there will be many more customers.

Of course it can be hard to trust that there will always be more work to be had; even so, it’s one thing to turn away a small opportunity, and another to turn down a big opportunity — especially one that promised to quickly fill up her time and replace her income in one fell swoop — which Melissa was soon to find out …

But for the moment, having spent her first week and a half setting up her business, half a week on phone calls, then a couple of weeks of one-on-one appointments with principals of real estate agencies, the bookings had started to roll in. It was still only a few shoots a week, in addition to the shoot or two a week that she was still doing for her old agency, but even so it was enough to add to Melissa’s freedom window (the amount of time Melissa could live on her savings and income) and gave her confidence that she could really do this.

She could succeed in her own business and be free of a boss for good.

In addition to booking meetings, Melissa had started to email out to her list as well, which included the agents she’d met with and the ones she hadn’t, as well as agents further afield than her immediate area. It was in response to one of these emails that Melissa received an interesting proposal. One of the principals of a larger agency had asked to meet Melissa to make her an offer. Curious, Melissa agreed.