ALYSSA SCHAEFER FULL INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
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INTRODUCTION AND PATH TO CONSULTING
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AJ: Welcome to this episode of the Thriving Through Podcast. Today, my guest is Alyssa Schaefer. And boy, are you in for a treat today. Alyssa, welcome.
Alyssa: Thank you for having me, I appreciate it.
AJ: What was your path to becoming a self-employed consultant?
Alyssa: Well, I think there's always a good story and a bad story, but unfortunately for me, the story was not as flattering. At a time where the fad of the month was to dismantle tech teams and use overseas resources, basically replace U.S. resources with overseas resources, me and my entire team was completely dismantled. I had realized when I was laid off that my boss was basically billing four times what he was paying me. Through that realization, I decided to brave the big bad world, be the wizard, step out from behind the curtain, if you will, of what I was doing for clients.
AJ: And just do it, and bill the clients directly, and make more money.
Alyssa: Yeah, well, and I was actually bummed about my LinkedIn profile. I was thinking, wow, I should have been building this up the whole time. So if you are just getting started, or you still have your 9 to 5, I highly recommend in the background—you can't lose anything by sharing content, just your daily stories. It can't hurt at all. Huge caveat that there's always a risk, but at the end of the day, building up the profile, asking for recommendations, there's so many things that I could have been doing the whole time that I was late to, or I felt late to. So if you have a 9 to 5, just do it.
AJ: Keep doing it. And that was about 8 years ago.
Alyssa: No, so I was a consultant for about 8 years, and I've been an independent consultant for about 2.
AJ: Oh, okay, so very focused on the last two years. Okay.
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FROM BARTENDING TO BUSINESS SYSTEMS
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AJ: How has—when we talked earlier, you talked both about that experience as a consultant and also your bartending for 10 years, and that unique combination shaped your perspective on building business systems. So tell me about that.
Alyssa: Well, I build technical infrastructure, and it's just a fancy word for how businesses operate. And my bartending was, ironically, one of my strongest skills that I brought to this picture, and that is because bartending, obviously you make drinks, and you are providing a service. But really, it's just talking to people. And so when it comes to technology, I will just kind of throw it out there that people get a little bit of a bruised ego. Nobody wants to say that they don't understand tech, and it's hard for people to admit that and feel okay with that, which I promise you, if you're listening to this, you are not alone, so feel free to admit it. It's okay, it's everybody.
What happens, though, is when I was in these tech meetings, I would call myself a social lubricant, because I was bridging the gap between the people who were tech know-hows and the tech don't-know-hows. I was able to use those communication skills to help everybody in the room understand—most importantly, the people who are tech know-hows, they need to know what they need to build and how they need to build it. The people who don't understand what they're talking about, especially if they come in the room thinking they know what they're talking about, we need information from them that's going to help us build it. Without making anybody feel less than, because it's just knowledge, I called myself a social lubricant because I was really using my bartending skills to bridge that gap. Bartending forces you to talk to everybody, all walks of life, and we won't even get into those stories, because this is mildly horrifying.
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OVERCOMING IMPOSTER SYNDROME
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AJ: So tell us a story or two about the biggest challenges you've faced in the last two years building your business, and how you've overcome them.
Alyssa: So I think the first thing everybody has to overcome is imposter syndrome. For the whole realization that I had of my boss billing 4X what he's paying me, just this whole concept of, I could have gone out on my own so long ago, and there's part of me that wishes I had. So I would say the first one is definitely imposter syndrome, and feeling like, oh, am I really qualified? Well, the reality is, everybody has valuable information to share.
It comes to the second thing, which is, do you actually want to do all of the legwork that it takes to own and run a business? I think that I had an advantage a little bit, just because I'm a business analyst. I knew what I needed to build. I think, unfortunately, a lot of consultants come in, and they're thinking, even if they don't suffer from imposter syndrome, they're like, I can do this! But then they're like, oh crap, I need a marketing system, and a sales system, and a service system, and a support system. And it's just me, so I gotta do all that.
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BUILDING THE FOUR ESSENTIAL SYSTEMS
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Alyssa: So I will say I had an advantage, but that doesn't necessarily help you do the work. You still have to do it. I actually enjoyed that process, though, figuring out for me individually how I wanted to support my clients and what was the best way for me to do that. Because one thing that when I was working for the last company I worked for, I was in back-to-back meetings. I would work 18-hour days because I was in 8 hours worth of meetings during the working hours, and then in those meetings, I had hours and hours and hours of work stacking up. So when are you gonna do that work? I would literally work 18-hour days.
So when I decided to go out on my own, I was not going to do meetings during my working hours. I was going to make sure that I had the time to think and the time to do the work that I was actually hired to do, and not just talk about the work. So, you know, setting up the processes for everything, I knew I had to do at the jump, because I didn't want to, later on, be scrambling trying to figure out all the other things that now I realize I need to do. I wanted to get that done up front.
When it comes to the imposter syndrome piece, there's a lot of things that I told you offline that we were chatting about, in terms of just the, you know, everyone's doing this, and you need to give yourself grace, because really it's just the shiny object syndrome. It's seeing other people doing their thing, and you think, oh, I'm not doing my thing, but really you probably are. You just need to stay focused on that thing, and stay focused on your clients, and it's a lot of noise out there.
AJ: It really is. I also think that sometimes we look at what other people are doing as inspiration for what we need to be doing. But the reality is, I mean, I call BS on all that, right? I mean, I don't think that we should be spending our time constantly comparing and contrasting. I think we should have a couple of people that we're looking to, who are maybe where we want to be in a couple of years, and so we're keeping an eye on the things that they're doing. But constantly comparing to people that we consider like our peers is a waste of time. I think we need to keep our heads down and do our own work.
Alyssa: Absolutely. I think that when it comes to, you know, people who are where you want to be, they say you'll be the average of the five people you surround yourself with. Unfortunately, those five people are probably, at least for most people, they're gonna be the five people you see on social media the most. So you just have to be mindful of how you're spending your time. You know, whether that's, if you actually have the time to engage on social and engage with people who you want to be like or are already like, then that's fantastic. But for most people, they don't have that time, and so they're just, there's that time suck that is social media, and you don't even realize the toll that it's taking.
AJ: Yeah, I mean, the key here is that you actually need to do the work, right? And for people who are building a business and just getting started, sometimes we jump from thing to thing to thing, and we think that, you know, I've got to have my lead magnet, and I've got to have my CRM, and I've got to have my this, and I've got to have that. But like you just said, you knew exactly what you were going to build, and you built that first. For people who are getting started, what would you say are the must-haves? What are the things that you absolutely need to build first?
Alyssa: So, there's four things. There's your marketing system, there's your sales system, there's your service system, and there's your support system. And so, you know, within each one of those, there are the must-haves. I would say that when it comes to, you know, looking at the, you know, people come to me and they're like, I need a website. And I'm like, well, do you need a website, or do you need to close clients? Because you can do an awful lot with social media, whether that's, you know, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, it doesn't matter. But, you know, that act of you engaging with people is going to be your best sales tool until you get to a point where you're big enough that you need that credibility of a website.
So, you know, I think a lot of people think that they need a website, and they go down that whole rabbit hole of what your website needs to be, and look, and feel, and say, and all this stuff. I say skip it, go right to the source, go talk to your people. If you can go talk to your people, then you're gonna be really successful at the get-go. When it comes to the sales system, you definitely need a calendar, and you need a CRM. Now, for a lot of people, the CRM is a Google Sheet. The CRM is something in Notion. It doesn't have to be a big, convoluted thing.
What you want is something that is capturing where people are in your pipeline. As simple as a Kanban board with a bucket for people who are in, you know, interested, they're talking, you've sent a proposal, they're ready to close. It can be that simple. Just something that allows you to see and track your people. Because once you have multiple people in that sales cycle, you need to know where they're at in that journey with you. So, just get them tracked in one place.
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THE LINKEDIN STRATEGY FOR ASPIRING CONSULTANTS
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AJ: You talked a little bit earlier about, you know, if you're still in a 9 to 5, you should be building your LinkedIn profile, and you should be asking for recommendations. Walk us through why that's so important, and how you wish you had done that earlier.
Alyssa: Well, because when I got laid off, I realized, oh crap, I have 10 years' worth of recommendations that I could have been asking for. And so when I went out on my own, I kind of was starting from scratch in terms of my credibility online. And so that's where it can hold you back a little bit, because you're like, well, if I go ask all these people now, are they gonna say yes? Are they gonna remember me? It's been so long.
Whereas if you're doing it as you go, it's fresh in their mind, they're excited about the work that you just did together, and they're gonna be more than willing to, you know, speak on your behalf. So I think that, you know, had I been doing that the whole time, I would have had so much more confidence when I went out on my own, because I would have had all of this social proof already built up. Instead, I had to spend the first year or two rebuilding that credibility.
And the other piece of it is, you know, when you're posting on LinkedIn, you're not just posting for yourself. You're posting for your future clients. You're building that know, like, and trust factor with people who are gonna need you later. And so, the more you can be sharing your expertise, sharing your stories, sharing your insights, the more people are gonna start to see you as the expert in your field. And then when they need you, you're gonna be top of mind.
AJ: And so for people who are still in a 9 to 5, and they're nervous about that, because they don't want their boss to know that they're thinking about leaving, what would you say to them?
Alyssa: I would say that you can post about your expertise without necessarily saying, I'm leaving. You know, you can post about the work that you're doing, you can post about the things that you're learning, you can post about the challenges that you're facing and how you're overcoming them. And all of that is building your credibility without necessarily saying, hey, I'm planning to leave and go out on my own. So I think there's a way to do it that doesn't necessarily raise red flags with your employer, but still allows you to build that foundation for when you're ready to make that leap.
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AVOIDING THE 18-HOUR DAY TRAP
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AJ: Let's talk a little bit about the service delivery side of things, because you mentioned that you were working 18-hour days. How did you structure your business differently when you went out on your own to avoid that trap?
Alyssa: So, I made a rule for myself that I would not have meetings during my working hours. And so what that meant is I would do all of my meetings either early in the morning or late in the evening, and then during my working hours, I would actually do the work. And that was a game changer for me, because it meant that I wasn't constantly context switching between, okay, I'm in a meeting, now I'm doing work, now I'm in another meeting, now I'm doing more work.
I could actually focus on the work that I needed to do without interruption. And then when I had my meetings, I was fully present in those meetings, because I wasn't thinking about all the work that I needed to get done. So that was a huge shift for me in terms of how I structured my time.
The other thing that I did is I made sure that I was very clear with my clients about my availability. I would say, you know, I'm available for meetings on these days at these times, and that's it. And so that helped me set those boundaries so that I wasn't constantly being pulled in different directions and feeling like I had to be available 24/7.
AJ: And how did clients respond to that?
Alyssa: You know, I think that when you set clear boundaries and expectations from the beginning, people respect that. And the people who don't respect that are probably not the clients that you want to work with anyway. So I think it's actually a really good filter for making sure that you're working with people who are gonna respect your time and your boundaries.
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THE TECH HEALTH SCORECARD AND FOUR PILLARS
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AJ: Tell us about the Tech Health Scorecard and what that is.
Alyssa: So the Tech Health Scorecard is a free quiz that I created that helps people identify which of the four pillars of their business—marketing, sales, service, or support—is actually the weakest link. Because a lot of times, people come to me and they're like, I need a website, or I need a CRM, or I need this specific tool. And when we dig into it, what they actually need is something completely different.
The pain that they're feeling in their business is not actually where the problem is originating from. And so the Tech Health Scorecard helps people identify, okay, here's where my weakest link is, and here's what I should be focusing on first. Because if you try to fix everything at once, you're gonna be overwhelmed and you're not gonna make progress on anything.
But if you can identify, okay, my marketing system is the weakest link, or my sales system is the weakest link, then you can focus all of your energy on fixing that one thing. And then once that's solid, you move on to the next thing. So the scorecard is really designed to give people that clarity about where they should be focusing their efforts.
AJ: And where can people find that?
Alyssa: So if you go to my website, which is bfd-ai.com, you can find the Tech Health Scorecard there. It's completely free, it takes about 5 minutes to complete, and then you get a personalized report that tells you which of the four pillars is your weakest link and what you should be focusing on.
AJ: That's fantastic. I love that it's free, and I love that it gives people a starting point, because I think that's one of the biggest challenges when you're building a business is just knowing where to start.
Alyssa: Absolutely. And you know, I created it specifically because I was tired of people coming to me and thinking they needed one thing when they actually needed something completely different. So I wanted to create something that would help people self-diagnose before they even came to talk to me, so that when we did talk, we could have a much more productive conversation about what they actually need.
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KNOWING WHAT TO BUILD VS. WHAT TO DELEGATE
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AJ: One of the things that I think a lot of consultants struggle with is knowing what they should be building themselves versus what they should be delegating or outsourcing. How do you think about that?
Alyssa: So I think there's a few different ways to think about it. The first is, what are you good at? What do you enjoy doing? Because if you're good at something and you enjoy doing it, then that's probably something you should be doing yourself. But if you're not good at it, or you don't enjoy doing it, then that's probably something you should be outsourcing or delegating.
The second piece of it is, what is the highest and best use of your time? So if you're spending your time on tasks that are, you know, $10 an hour tasks, but you could be spending that time on tasks that are $100 an hour tasks, then you're leaving money on the table. So you need to be really honest with yourself about, you know, what is the value of your time, and how should you be spending that time to maximize the value that you're creating for your business.
And then the third piece is, what can be systematized and automated? Because there's a lot of things that, you know, once you set them up, they just run on autopilot. And so if you can identify those things and get them systematized and automated, then you're freeing up your time to focus on the things that actually require your brain and your expertise.
AJ: And how do you think about the balance between investing in tools and systems versus just doing things manually in the beginning?
Alyssa: So I think in the beginning, you want to do things manually, because you need to understand the process before you can automate it. If you try to automate something before you understand how it works, you're gonna end up with a system that doesn't actually serve you. So I always recommend that people start by doing things manually, figure out what works, figure out what doesn't work, and then once you have a process that you're confident in, that's when you start to look at, okay, how can I automate this? How can I systematize this?
But don't try to build the perfect system from the beginning, because you don't know what the perfect system looks like yet. You need to go through the process of actually doing the work to figure out what you need.
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IDENTITY SHIFTING FROM EMPLOYEE TO ENTREPRENEUR
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AJ: You mentioned earlier that there was a resource that was really helpful to you in making that identity shift from employee to entrepreneur. Can you talk about that?
Alyssa: Yeah, so there's a man on YouTube, his name is Kwasi Johar, and he does a lot of identity shifting work and shadow work. And when I first got started, his YouTube channel was completely invaluable for actually turning me from the employee to the self-employed. Because I think one of the biggest challenges when you make that transition is, you know, you've been conditioned your whole life to be an employee. You've been conditioned to show up at a certain time, do the work that you're told to do, and then go home. And when you become self-employed, all of a sudden you're responsible for everything. You're responsible for finding the clients, you're responsible for doing the work, you're responsible for managing the finances, all of it.
And so there's this huge identity shift that has to happen where you go from being someone who's told what to do to being someone who decides what to do. And that's a really challenging shift for a lot of people. So Kwasi's work was really helpful for me in making that transition and really owning the identity of being a business owner and being self-employed.
AJ: And how would people find him?
Alyssa: So if you just type in Kwasi, Q-U-A-Z-I, into YouTube, his videos will come up. And if you type in Kwasi identity shift, you'll find a ton of really great material.
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RAPID FIRE WRAP-UP QUESTIONS
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AJ: Now, as we start to wrap up, I have some rapid-fire wrap-up questions. What's one book, podcast, or resource that's been invaluable to your consulting practice?
Alyssa: So the first struggle was imposter syndrome. So, there's a man on YouTube, his name is Kwasi Johar, and he does a lot of identity shifting and shadow work. When I first got started, his YouTube channel was completely invaluable for actually turning me from the employee to the self-employed.
AJ: Okay, and his name again?
Alyssa: Kwasi Johar, Q-U-A-Z-I. If you type that into YouTube, his videos will come up, but if you type in Q-U-A-Z-I, identity shift, I mean, just great material.
AJ: Okay, great. What is one piece of advice you wish someone had given you when you started consulting on your own?
Alyssa: What's one piece of advice I wish that somebody gave me? Well, you don't know what you don't know. And I already knew that going in, I did know that. But I will say that the ability to stay open to accepting that you don't know what you don't know can be hard when it's you reminding yourself, and not somebody reminding you. Did that make sense?
AJ: It does, yeah. Yeah, it's also because we kind of have to, especially in the early years, we kind of have to posture a little bit and sort of be a little bit bigger than we are, maybe? Because we are trying to get people to hire us for our expertise, so we want to make sure that we come across confidently, and sometimes that hinders our ability to say, I just don't know.
Alyssa: Well, that's also why I was saying build your LinkedIn profile now, because if you're doing that, then all of a sudden you don't have to come in blank. You can say, look at all these recommendations of people who have already said, I do the thing I say I do. And that's where it took me a minute to rebuild my own testimonials when I could have easily had 10 years' worth of testimonials.
Well, squirrel brain, the second thing left, but the LinkedIn profile, building that up, then you don't actually have to pretend. It can help you do both things at the same time, building confidence and also actually having those client testimonials. Because people don't just show up and be a consultant about something they don't know, but have you been tracking all the people you've helped with it? Probably not.
AJ: Because your boss doesn't want you to do that, because then you get more confidence that you could go do it yourself. You just have to know it's something for you, and it'll help you later, if you ever wanted to do it.
AJ: Last and most important question. How can listeners connect with you if they want to learn more about you and your work?
Alyssa: Well, if you want to do the Tech Health Scorecard, I will give you the link that you can put in the show notes. I would say that the four pillars of any business that you could be failing on, you don't actually have to talk to me. I made the scorecard so that people could actually make a difference in their business without me. This is my new theme. How do I help people without actually being in the room?
But if you do want to actually put me in the room and talk to me a little bit and pick my brain, if you will, then you can find me on LinkedIn. I go by the handle TheBusinessCowgirl. You can also find me on YouTube, same handle, TheBusinessCowgirl, and there are already a ton of free resources on there for you to get you started. But both of those things are going to lead you toward, if you ever wanted to have a chat or a clarity call, because I will say that people know where their pain is in their tech, but most of the time, people don't know where it's coming from.
So the clarity of, okay, the pain I'm feeling is real, it's not made up, and it's coming from over here, but really that pain started over there. By telling me where, it's the same thing with magicians, right? The whole art of misdirection. That's tech in a nutshell. So if you ever need to talk to somebody who knows where the misdirection's coming from, then the Business Cowgirl.
AJ: Perfect. Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast today.
Alyssa: Thank you for having me.
AJ: And for those of you listening, until next time, keep thriving through.