When you’ve run your Soloist business long enough, you’ll see cycles: changes in the market, changes in you/your interests and situation and your bank account. Business coach Ed Gandia shares how his business, his financials and his mindset have changed over 18 years as a Soloist:

Growing his first freelance business entirely by word of mouth—and the markers he used to decide when to invest more or pivot.

The role of fear in his decisions and business growth (and why it’s different today).

Building a community when that skillset isn’t part of your DNA—and the advantages of longevity.

How using even small wins as fuel can re-wire your financial mindset (and your finances).

Traveling the full circle of financial mindset growth—from scarcity to success to recklessness to abundance.

LINKS

Ed Gandia Website | LinkedIn | Twitter

Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram

BIO

Ed Gandia is a business-building coach who helps established freelance writers and solo marketers earn more in less time doing work they love for better clients.

His High-Income Business Writing podcast has more than 1.3 million downloads. And his insights and advice have been featured in SUCCESS Magazine, Forbes, Inc. magazine, Fortune, Fast Company, The Christian Science Monitor and The Atlanta Journal Constitution.

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TRANSCRIPT

00:00 - 00:22

Ed Gandia: I had a rule that all my side hustle income during those 2, 2 and a half years, after taxes, I would take 10% to reward myself and do something fun with or buy something cool. And then the rest straight to savings. I have 3 indicators that would show me I was ready to make the transition. And 1 of them was have a year's worth of living expenses.

00:27 - 01:10

Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to the Soloist Life podcast, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I'm Rochelle Molten. And today I'm so excited to welcome Ed Gandia to the show. Ed is a business building coach who helps establish freelance writers and solo marketers earn more in less time doing work they love for better clients. His high income business writing podcast has more than 1.3 million downloads and his insights and advice have been featured in Success Magazine, Forbes, Inc, Fortune, Fast Company, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Ed, welcome.

01:10 - 01:16

Ed Gandia: Well, thank you, Rochelle, and I'm really delighted to be here and talking with you.

01:16 - 01:33

Rochelle Moulton: Well, I still can't believe that we haven't met before this. So I know we have and I checked last night. I checked over 100 contacts in common just on LinkedIn. And quite a few of those are people that I know very, very well. So we've been running in these parallel universes for years.

01:34 - 01:36

Ed Gandia: It's still a small world, isn't it?

01:36 - 02:00

Rochelle Moulton: It really is. Well, once we connected on LinkedIn, I started reading your posts and I found I was doing a lot of head nodding. And especially when you veered into this idea of financial mindset. And I'd like to talk about that with you, but first I'd really love for you to share your story, starting with how you segued from selling software to being such a beloved touch point for freelance writers.

02:01 - 02:30

Ed Gandia: Absolutely. So I'm going to maybe give you an extended version of the story, because I think some of the details matter for some of the things we're going to be talking about today. But I have a finance degree. I had no idea what I was going to do with it. It just sounded like a good degree to get. But in the early 90s, we're going through a big recession. Our professors are telling us that most of us are going to end up in sales. And I thought that is the last thing I will ever, ever do.

02:30 - 03:07

Ed Gandia: There's no way. I have a finance degree. I don't do sales. And interestingly enough, those are the only interviews I got later that year. I ended up in corporate sales. The last thing I wanted to do. The other thing I had told myself is that I'll never live in South Florida because I went to school in Tampa. And I ended up in South Florida. So yeah, be careful what you wish for or don't wish for. So I was in corporate sales and I for 6 or so years ended up working for companies that didn't do much

03:07 - 03:27

Ed Gandia: in the way of marketing and sales enablement resources, what we now call sales enablement. So I ended up creating a lot of my own materials. Most of my sales roles involved very aggressive quotas in environments where if you don't make your numbers, you're not going to have a job.

03:28 - 03:29

Rochelle Moulton: You're gone.

03:29 - 04:03

Ed Gandia: Yeah, you're pretty much gone, especially my last employer, which was a bit of a startup. They were kind of past the startup phase. But these were not Fortune 500 companies that could afford to just kind of keep you. You couldn't hide. Your results are extremely visible. So that was kind of the training ground that I had. And because I had to make these numbers and I was under pressure, I realized that I couldn't scale my efforts enough. I had to find many of my own opportunities. And there's only so much cold calling. Yes, I actually cold

04:03 - 04:39

Ed Gandia: called a lot, like pick up the phone, cold calling. And there weren't enough hours in the day. So I kind of came across this idea that people were calling copywriting. I found it fascinating. To me, I thought of it as selling on paper. I just thought, well, I can duplicate my efforts because if I can somehow do this well, I can have other people, so to speak, calling on prospects for me, cold calling. So that's what I did. I studied copywriting and I created campaigns that actually ended up generating pretty significant results and they helped put

04:39 - 05:08

Ed Gandia: money in my pocket. I had to create results. So I did that for a long time, but it wasn't until I realized 1 day that other people did this for a living, that I could actually turn this into a business. I had already set a goal that eventually I wanted to go out of my own, start a business, launch a business. But I was thinking more traditional brick and mortar. And I realized maybe this is it. Maybe it's just, you know, I've become a freelance copywriter and that's what I did. So in summer of 2006, I

05:08 - 05:23

Ed Gandia: had already built up my client base to a point where I was working 7 days a week. I had enough of a side hustle. It was healthy and consistent enough that I could afford to quit my day job. And I haven't looked back. So it's been what 18 years and...

05:23 - 05:24

Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, going on 20.

05:25 - 06:03

Ed Gandia: Going on 20. It was nerve wracking, but it was also a lot of fun just to be able to go out there. And my clients were enterprise software companies. Just word of mouth, referrals, email marketing, some direct mail relationships. I would just go out there and do my thing. Eventually, people would come to me, other colleagues, fellow freelancers, because they saw my quick success. So I was earning a nice six-figure income in software sales. When I quit my day job, I transitioned straight into a six-figure freelance copywriting business. And they felt, to me, I just had

06:03 - 06:38

Ed Gandia: to make that happen. I had a young family. But to them, that was very, very unusual. So people started coming to me for advice. And I realized, maybe I should create some kind of ebook or information product. And that's what I did. And I put it out there and long story short, it just did well. That turned into partnering up with a couple of colleagues. We co-wrote a book by the name of The Wealthy Freelancer through an imprint of Penguin, which is insane. First time author and I'm writing a book for Penguin with 2 friends.

06:38 - 06:39

Rochelle Moulton: It is.

06:40 - 07:14

Ed Gandia: Yeah, yeah. It was pretty amazing. The book didn't really make any money, but It was the launch pad for my coaching business a couple years later. So in 2012, I started doing business coaching. And that's pretty much been my focus ever since then for about 12 years. I still had some writing clients in 2016. The last 1 got acquired. So I just became a full time business coach. And that's what I've been doing ever since. Lately, I've been kind of looking into maybe my next iteration, the next phase of my bu