
A year of business admin—more exciting than you might expect
Is TEA going to become my full-time job?
My editor friends and I sometimes joke that editors are a particular breed of person: curious and analytical, delighting in both the whimsy and the structure of language, determined to bring out the best in a text and yet tactful almost to a fault. These qualities have always been part of my character, and so I will always be an editor.
Has helping other freelance editors with their business admin made me focus more on mine?
Apart from the admin of running my TEA business, simply hearing about other editors’ admin needs has inspired me to record and analyze more data in more ways. I’ve refined how I track HST and how I invoice clients in installments. Perhaps most importantly, talking to other editors about their businesses has inspired me to set aside regular blocks of time to invest in my own.
I realized that I need to apply the same self-care and business-care principles that I learned when I began freelance editing: scrambling to fill every minute with paid editing work left no time for monitoring the health of my business, developing my skills, or expanding into new areas of interest. As I’ve gotten more TEA clients and given more Excel presentations in the past few months, I’ve become braver about declining editorial projects that would cut into my TEA time. And not a moment too soon—in June and July I’ll be leading sessions on using Excel at Editors Canada's Editors Transform online conference, IPEd’s Editing on the Edges online annual conference, and in a SENSE workshop, so I’ve decided this will be my #SpreadsheetSummer.
Would I ever launch a new product again?
In fact, as I write this, I have a couple of ideas germinating. Stay tuned to see what I brew next…