In today’s episode, Brooke speaks with Jen Liddy, a former high school teacher who left the profession and became an entrepreneur. Today she is a Content Creation Specialist who helps people shift their exact right audience into their ideal clients. In the middle of her teaching career, she realized she was working really hard, was well educated, loved her job, and wasn’t making any money. She wondered what she was doing wrong. She left teaching in 2007 when her son was born and went on to become a college professor. During that time, phones were coming into the classroom and she felt less like an educator and more like someone policing a classroom. It wore her down and she realized she was always looking for an out. She experienced some resistance from her peers as she told them she was leaving education. She was told things like, “you’re just a teacher”, “what about your retirement.” She wants other teachers to know they are smart and creative and can do other things. You don’t have to have a business degree to start a business. She still teaches but the difference is the people she’s teaching want to be in the room and they care about learning.
Jen says it’s easy to burnout when you’re a business owner, especially when you’re a solopreneur and don’t have a team yet or feel like you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re in a period of gathering information and learning from others and imposter syndrome can lead to burnout. It’s important to be on the lookout for burnout and notice what you’re feeling. Jen’s business went from general accountability coaching to general business coaching and then she found out she liked content and pulling words out of people’s heads. She kept leaning into words being her thing and organized and sequential and she narrowed her niche. The more specific you can be with who you help, the easier it will be to be well known for something. She likes people to understand you can create a business that works for you based on your strengths and the way your brain works for you.
She created a membership called the content creator’s studio. It was an online creation classroom and she marketed it and she always had just over 30 people in it. She knew it was working and realized that people always tell you to go big and scale, and she realized she can’t help a huge number of people at once but can do more with a smaller group. Her challenge has been to trust her intuition. Trusting yourself that you’ll pivot and iterate is hard and scary and you have to take that leap. Surround yourself with people online or following people online that align with you.
Jen is a big podcast listener and she recommends getting as much information as you can from podcasts versus courses. Find the people who get you and if you do invest in a course, she wishes she would have invested in someone who would have put eyes on her business. Her favorite place for understanding money and business is Denise Duffield-Thomas podcast and books on her money boot camp. Personal development is a big part of entrepreneurship.
The legacy Jen wants to have is to help people get their messaging and content out there. She wants to show people how to do it in a way that feels good and gets them the clients they want to work with.
Bio:
Jen left her high school teaching career to avoid a life doomed by grading crappy 9th grade Romeo & Juliet essays.
In 2013, she made a terrifying leap into entrepreneurship & learned everything the hard way!
Today, as a Content Creation Specialist, Jen helps personal brands step off the content creation DREADmill, become better writers, & get out of content chaos with strategies that ease-ify, simplify, and actually make content feel GOOD for you
Links:
@jenliddycoach
jenliddy.com
