This is hard.

Four times building my business has made me want to just curl up and cry.

Happy Friday, friends!

I’ll be honest, it’s been one of those weeks. On Monday I got responses back on three different proposals — each one a no.

The first had been a verbal yes — the lead was deciding between options, but then came back having decided to handle things internally while they worked through a fundraise (so really, a “not now”).

The second, I was super confident that I was the best fit for the work — and the feedback suggested I wasn’t wrong. But they went with someone who clicked better with the founder.

And the third shared that they’d decided to go in another direction — I’m guessing that means they hired full-time.

It was slightly soul-crushing, and definitely not the side of things you see from all the Instagram gurus. I keep reminding myself that if I had a 100% close rate, it’d probably mean that my rates were too low. And having a lot of other active opportunities in my pipeline takes the sting out of the rejections — but in the past, this definitely would’ve sent me into panic mode.

Before I share those tales of woe, I want to pause for a little celebration — next week is the two-year anniversary of Fractional Fridays! 🎉 (I am also SO FREAKING CLOSE to a thousand subscribers — 998 as I’m writing this on Thursday. Please nobody unsubscribe! 😂)

Anyway, since the actual Substackiversary falls on a holiday weekend, I’m celebrating a little early…and as a marketer, I’d be remiss if I didn’t have a little something for you. ❤️

→ If your business is feeling a little harder than it should, book a Clarity Session with me and save $50 — plus I’ll gift you a free year of Fractional Fridays.

Whether your pipeline is dry, your positioning doesn’t feel quite right, your clients are eating up so much of your time that you don’t have bandwidth for biz dev, or you just aren’t sure where to start, we’ll pinpoint what’s going on and you’ll walk away with clear next steps to fix it.

This isn’t another swipe file or magic funnel — it’s tailored guidance from someone who’s been in it for 8+ years — and still is.

Book your call by Monday and use code SUB50 to take advantage of the $50 savings and free year of Fractional Fridays.

Also through Monday, I’m offering 25% off my Build Your Pipeline digital workshop and annual subscriptions to Fractional Fridays. The discount for each will automatically apply at checkout.

(If you’re currently a monthly subscriber and want to upgrade to annual, message me at meghan@fractionalfridays.com and I’ll help you figure it out — Substack doesn’t make it easy!)

Okay — now let’s talk about hard times! 🤪 There have been a few really rough patches in my business, and I want to normalize that building a business isn’t easy. So if you’re in a season where it feels really hard, it’s because it is hard — but it’s also temporary.

The first time I contemplated calling it quits

A year into building my business, things were going okay, but everything felt like such a struggle. I felt like I was working all the time, and the context-switching between clients was killlling me¹.

I was also starting to think about selling my condo and buying a house, but it felt so out of reach without a steady corporate paycheck. I remember explaining to my dad that it was time for me to give up and go back to corporate, and he was like…but why?

So I rattled off all the things that’d need to happen for me to make my business work, including a revenue number that felt insane at the time. My dad asked me why I couldn’t do that, and I didn’t have a good answer. The next day, I decided to go for it.

I started by raising my rates — slowly at first, then a bump that put me close to 2x my starting rate. (More dad logic: if everyone’s saying yes — and those yeses are coming easily — you need to charge more.)

As I raised my rates, I started to shift who I was working with — the clients I’d been working with weren’t the same ones who could pay me twice as much. I played the Tarzan game here, not letting go of one vine (an old client) until I had the next vine (a new client) firmly in hand. (Find my script for breaking up with a client here.)

The income target that initially felt wild became reality — not overnight, but faster than I expected. And the thing that really made it work was believing it was possible. I feel like that ties a bow on the story in a way I normally wouldn’t, but it’s true — if I hadn’t really believed that I could charge more, I would’ve been afraid to raise my rates.

(If you need help believing, take my rates survey to find out what your peers are charging. How’s that for tying a bow on it? 😜)

The time the work disappeared

The year after I made those changes, I was crushing it. I was still working a ton, but it was lockdown, so what else was I going to do with my time, right? Just work, Tiger King, and obsessively wiping down my groceries.

I’d Tarzaned myself free of my low-paying clients and taken on a big one that my friends had actually heard of. But that was it. Just the one.

What started as a project quickly turned into an interim Head of Growth role, and I found myself working 40+ hour weeks with that one client (good thing I was billing hourly, I guess).

A few months in, the CMO started asking me if I’d come onboard full time, and I kept saying no. As my contract was nearing its end, I still wasn’t ready to commit to joining as an FTE, so we started the process of renewing (this was before the days of my auto-renewing retainers). The contract amendment was flowing through legal, waiting for final signatures…and then the CMO abruptly left the company.

My contract wasn’t renewed.

I had about two days’ notice to wrap things up,² and because that one client had eaten up so much of my time and energy, I had nothing in the pipeline. In fact, at the time, I didn’t even know how to build a pipeline, so I more or less sat around and hoped for the next few months.

I managed to close one client from an inbound lead, and started a conversation with another who’d become one of my biggest clients the following year, but otherwise, all that hoping (with no real action behind it) put me in a situation where I ended up accepting a full-time role at the end of the year.

That lasted for six weeks. From a few days in, I knew it wasn’t the right fit, so when the lead I’d previously spoken to came back ready to get a contract in place, I leapt at the opportunity.

I learned two of my biggest lessons during this season of my business. First, the best time to do biz dev is when you don’t need new business. And second, putting all of your eggs in one basket is risky when it comes to revenue — if you’re considering taking on a 40-hour/week retainer, find all my thoughts (and how I’d go about de-risking it) here.

Beyond the paywall, I’m talking about the time a client was 60+ days late on a $20k payment, and the time where I couldn’t close a deal to save my life.

If you find value in Fractional Fridays and would like to help keep it going, please consider becoming a paid subscriber or one-time supporter. You’ll get access to exclusive content and the full archive, including how I grew my pipeline from $16k to six figures in less than a month.

The time my biggest client ignored my invoice

After I quit that short-lived full-time role, I spent nearly a year working with a client I loved. After we wrapped, I sent off my final invoice and moved on…until the payment due date rolled around, and the money hadn’t found its way to my bank account.