Crystal Williams
Website: bigbrightbulb.com
Twitter: @bigbrightbulb
Attended: Lift Off 1 (February 2010)
Where were you in your entrepreneurial journey before Lift Off? Before Lift Off, I was both stuck and scattered. Imagine playing Twister and you’re spread all over the mat like a spider with half its legs and twice the frustration… that’d be me!
I had a popular blog, some skills, and some paying work, and was very busy–but it wasn’t adding up to anything much.
The worst part was I felt like everyone else was thriving and succeeding with ease, while I was just a tangled mess of skills and effort and purpose and intention.
What are you up to now? Life After Lift Off: After 1) Learning about creating a business model, marketing plan, and payment schedule that suits my personality and preferences (who knew?!) 2) Some soul-searching and Self-knowing, and 3) Some trial-and-error prototyping (what Pam calls Failing Fast), I have as many regular clients as I can handle, money accumulating in the bank, and time each week to work on big picture projects to balance the dollars-per-hour exchange of client work.
What Crystal’s Up To, September 2011 Update:
Now I’ve got as much work as I can handle without advertising or promoting. All my clients come through referral, which suits my introverted I-don’t-wanna-put-myself-out-there personality just fine.
And that’s all because I took Pam’s excellent advice from Lift Off to savor and enjoy my relationships with just a few Connectors–people who know lots of other people. These connections serve everyone involved, and through this work I’ve gotten clear on who I most enjoy working with and what kind of work I do best. That clarity is a wonderful, amazing feeling.
I still have my tangled moments, but they’re few and far between now. Pam & Charlie’s Lift Off retreat is among the best things I’ve done for my business and for myself.
What was your favorite thing about Lift Off? The best thing about Lift Off was being among people who were doing completely different work and yet had encountered the same problems. It was reassuring to hear the concerns, worries, frets, and mistakes of people I considered “perfect” entrepreneurs. It was a relief to see that the problems I was bumping into were universal, inevitable, and, most important–resolvable. What a relief to find that everyone meets challenges at every stage of business, and that mistakes are a necessary part of the process… not the beginning of the end!
And because everyone who attended was at a different place on the biz journey–some very established, some just starting out, and some in the middle (like me)–I was able to gather advice from folks farther along the path and also share my advice and experiences with folks who were just starting out. Everyone had something valuable and unique to contribute.
But the best thing is many of the folks I met there are still friends of mine. They know that if they holler for help, I’m there… and I know they’re there for me, too.
