We were lucky to catch up with Makeda Brown recently and have shared our conversation below.

Makeda, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Owning a business isn’t always glamorous and so most business owners we’ve connected with have shared that on tough days they sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have just had a regular job instead of all the responsibility of running a business. Have you ever felt that way?

There are some days I feel so blessed to be a business owner, and there are some days when I’m wondering wtf I’m doing and if it’s time for me to go back to a regular job.

95% of the time, these thoughts come up because of finances. (And before I share on this, I want to preface this by saying I’m someone who suffers from high-functioning anxiety.) But for me, sometimes, the loss of one client can feel like the end of the world. Even though it never is. But the idea of a chunk of income suddenly gone could send me into a spiral of budgeting and balancing. Which then puts me on the hunt for the next client. It’s a different type of hustle from the 9-5 until you learn how to get your systems set up and consistently bring in leads.

But on the flip side, I’m also reminded that some could argue being an entrepreneur is more secure than that of a regular job. If I were to get fired from a 9-5, my entire income would be gone in an instant. But with my business, one client only means a fraction of my income is taking a dip, and because clients can literally walk into my inbox overnight, it can shoot right back up again.

As I say this, I’m reminded of a time that I lost my biggest client, and things were really about to hit the fan. Then on the last day of the month, after working my a$$ off to market, a lead came in who ended up tripling the monthly income that previous client had been. A different type of hustle.

Another reason is that society makes it extremely hard for small business owners, especially new small business owners (entrepreneurs who started within the last 3 years), to have the same privileges as a “regular job.”

For example, when my family and I were ready to buy a home, we couldn’t find a loan that would allow us to purchase a home since I had become an entrepreneur. This was despite having excellent credit and making more than I ever had in my career. Since we were moving from state to state, we had to go back to renting, and even that was difficult to secure.

So yeah, I sometimes wonder.

However, when I’m sitting in my office, and my sons are able to run up to me at any point of the day and ask me to help them fix a toy or show me something they drew, I’m reminded of why I do this. I’ve been able to retire my husband. I’ve been able to make more in one month than I ever did in a quarter when I was at my 9-5. I’ve been able to write a book. I can pick up and go on vacation whenever I want. I’m not checking in with anybody about time-off or sick days. When my mental health needs some nourishing, I can switch off my laptop and do whatever it is I need to do.

Being a business owner has given me a new level of freedom and a mindset shift that I know I’ll never be able to walk away from. So even with the stress, I know I’m here for good.

Makeda, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

As a brand voice expert, I make your brand voice soak into every aspect of my client’s content (social media captions, blogs, sales pages, websites, the works!) As a copywriter, I make their audience take that content and run with it.

I get them to book calls. Hit the follow button. Click the purchase CTA. All the things that make a brand’s heart sing. In short: I make their audience fall in love with them.

Before I was a copywriter though, I had a 10-year career as an office manager for a doctor’s office. While the pay was great, it was not the career I had ever wanted to be in and because of the environment, a lot of stuff happened to my mental health in the span of those 10 years. Which is why, when I started having kids, I told myself that I wouldn’t stay there. I wanted to be a role model for them but more importantly, I really wanted to be there for them as they grew up. Not in an office for 8hrs out of the day.

So when I had my 2nd son, I decided to take the dive into the online world. I started out as a Virtual Assistant with a plan of becoming an Online Business Manager. Within 6 months I cut myself down to part-time at my job and within 9 months, I was officially out the door.

And while I enjoyed VA’ing during that time, I had always had an interest in writing, I have a bachelors in English with a concentration in creative writing, and my clients would often ask me to write things from time to time. And the more I got great feedback, the more I looked into becoming a copywriter. At first, I was hesitant because I thought there was some fancy degree you had to have to become a copywriter but after studying other copywriters and learning their techniques, I realized I was already doing a lot of that stuff on my own. So after a year in my business, i took the pivot, and the rest is history.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

As I mentioned before, I suffer with high-functioning anxiety.

In the beginning, that was a recipe for disaster as a new entrepreneur. I obsessed and overthought about EVERYTHING. My brand, my social media, what I was investing my time in, how I was showing up for my clients, the money I was making, the money I was not making, what everyone else was doing.

It was exhausting. And while a lot of entrepreneurs find themselves burned out within maybe a year or two of starting their business, I was burnout within a few months.

I didn’t want to get anything wrong, and I didn’t want to disappoint anyone. As the breadwinner of my household, I felt like there was no time to f up. And for the first year in my business, that did some damage, to put it lightly. My business and reputation grew but I didn’t, and I knew I couldn’t keep operating that way.

So to change things up, I started investing in myself as much as I was investing in my business. I knew I didn’t want to go back to the 9-5 but I also knew there was no future if I kept judging myself and operating in the way that I was. So I started putting the seeds of a new mindset into my thoughts.

De-escalating the urgency I always created. The people pleasing I naturally bent too and the need to be in control of every minute of every day.

We’re not ALL the way there yet, but its only because I started doing those shifts that not only is my business thriving today, but that I’m even alive today.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Not everyone has the answer out here!

As a new business owner, its so easy to get caught up in the hype of coaching and courses. I’ve invested over $15k in courses and coaching programs hoping that they would lead me to the $$ that I wanted to have, and they didn’t teach me anything I already knew.

I trusted in someone else rather than myself, and that’s something I have to learn from.

Another underbelly of it all, is that the playing field for black entrepreneurs is drastically different from that of our white counterparts. There were so many times I leaned on the idea of “well, she did it, so I can do it”. And while that’s true, I had to learn that for me, I had to do it differently.

Contact Info:

• Website: ayanacreative.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/ayanacreative
• Facebook: facebook.com/ayanacreative
• Linkedin: linkedin.com/ayanacreative
• Twitter: twitter.com/ayanacreative
• Youtube: n/a
• Yelp: n/a

Image Credits
kameyphotography