Do You Know Your Business Model?

Do you know your business model?

What are even the options when it comes to a business model for a solo creative professional anyway? 

And what’s the difference between your business model and what you call yourself? 

These questions started as a conversation over coffee in Portland, Oregon recently, with 2 of my favorite coaches from the Simplest Marketing Plan program, Lisa Mullis and Bonnie Fanning. Then, because everything is content :), it blossomed into an episode of the Marketing Mentor Podcast.

So listen here and below.

If you like what you hear, we’d love it if you write a review, subscribe here and sign up for Quick Tips from Marketing Mentor.

And If you want my help figuring all of this out, take advantage of my free mentoring session. 

Read the transcript here

ilise: Hi there. This is ilise Benun, your marketing mentor, and this is the podcast for you if — and only if — you're ready to leave the feast-or-famine syndrome behind. And I mean for good.

ilise: Let me ask you a question — do you know your business model? It's kind of a jargony term that most people in my circle may not be able to answer. What are even the options when it comes to a business model for a solo creative professional, anyway? And what's the difference between your business model and what you call yourself? These are all questions we tackle in today's episode, a threesome with two of my favorite coaches from the Simplest Marketing Plan program, Lisa Mullis and Bonnie Fanning. The three of us were having coffee in Portland, Oregon recently, talking shop, when — of course — I heard content, and we agreed we had to continue the conversation as a podcast episode. It's probably not going to be the last with these super smart women. So listen and learn.

---

ilise: Alright, welcome, y'all, to the podcast. I'm here with Lisa Mullis and Bonnie Fanning, who are both coaches in the SMP, the Simplest Marketing Plan program, and I'm so happy to be here. Let's begin by each of you introducing yourselves. Bonnie, we'll go alphabetically — would you go first?

Bonnie Fanning: Hello, everyone, I'm Bonnie Fanning. I'm a content strategist, coming from a copy and content writing background, and I'm now focusing on the travel industry after going out on my own — quitting my job a little over three years ago — and figuring out the whole, I want to say freelance, but we'll discuss that word later, freelance lifestyle. I'm so happy to be here, thanks for having me.

ilise: Of course. Lisa, tell us who you are.

Lisa Mullis: Hi, everyone, I'm Lisa Mullis, and I'm a business advisor and messaging specialist for service professionals and small teams — really helping people figure out how to close the gaps between what they're doing, how they're talking about it, and what that means for the systems and workflows in their business, so they can have more consistent revenue coming in.

ilise: And who wouldn't want that? Awesome. Well, I'm thrilled to be collaborating with you both, and so privileged that you agreed to spend part of your time with me, with the Simplest Marketing Plan program, and with the community. So I want to start by thanking you both for that — it's been awesome so far, and we're looking forward to 2027. In preparation for that, we were all sitting at a donut place — I think it was a gluten-free donut place — in Portland last month, having a great conversation, brainstorming ideas, talking about the struggles we have and that the people we work with have, and we thought, this has to be a podcast. So we're going to try to remember what we talked about — not recreate it exactly, but touch on some of those ideas and see where it goes. How does that sound, y'all?

Lisa Mullis: Sounds great.

ilise: Alright, good. So the first topic has to do with the idea of your business model, because we all work with — and are ourselves — self-employed individuals. Some people call themselves entrepreneurs, some freelancers, some small business owners, president of a small business, whatever you call yourself — we all fall into that category. But often, especially at the beginning, we have no idea what a business model even is, let alone what ours is, or that we even need one. So when this topic came up, I thought, we definitely need to talk about this. Lisa, since you were the one who brought it up over donuts and coffee, I'll ask you to tee it up for us — give us a little foundation, and then we'll respond.

Lisa Mullis: Yeah — I'm really big on business models, because once you understand what type of business you're running, it helps you make better decisions about how you're spending your time and other resources. That's the main issue, because a lot of times I see people pursuing strategies or spending time in areas that don't actually map back to the type of business they're running — and they wouldn't necessarily know that. Your business model also changes over time. The way I look at it, there are roughly three main categories your business model might fall into.

Lisa Mullis: One is what I'd call the "hired hand" — your work is coming primarily through someone else's system. You might be working for an agency, or through a gig marketplace, or you might just have one or two clients keeping you busy — you're primarily selling your time and skill, and your marketing is minimal, because you're operating inside someone else's business. Sometimes this looks like being a subcontractor, or a 1099 contractor here in the US.

Lisa Mullis: The second category is "owner-operator" — you own the client relationship and the pipeline from start to finish, you're selling offers and outcomes, and marketing is an ongoing thing for you, because nobody else is generating demand for you — you have to go out and do it yourself. The third category would be hybrid or leveraged, where you have some scalable component to your business, or a team, so that not everything is 100% reliant on your personal availability and capacity to show up and deliver the service.

ilise: Does that mean the owner-operator — I've heard you use that term, but never heard anyone else use it — is that a solopreneur doing everything themselves, or could they have a team too?

Lisa Mullis: An owner-operator could have a team, but they're still out there on the front lines with their clients — that's how I define it, they're somehow involved in doing the actual client-delivery work, even if they have some team support. I'm an owner-operator myself, and I do have team support that creates capacity for me to show up for clients.

ilise: Alright, Bonnie, what are you?

Bonnie Fanning: Wait, my business has a category? That's where I am, that's where I'm sitting. I think up until now — going freelance originally, and I say "going freelance" because using that word felt like freedom to me. It felt like, I'm by myself now, nobody's the boss of me, I can go out and just make stuff and people will pay me — a very simplified view of how all this works. It wasn't until recently that people started telling me, you shouldn't say you're a freelance writer, stop saying that — even though it feels great to say it — people are saying, you should really be a contractor, you should be a strategist, you should be something else. So it's really only now that I'm starting to think about these terms and how the world actually perceives them. I had no negative connotation with the word "freelancer" before — I just loved saying it — but now it's definitely something I'm thinking about.

ilise: I want to make a distinction here, because I think the two of you are actually talking about two different things. Lisa, you're talking about the business model — how you see yourself, how you set yourself up, which helps determine what marketing you do, how much, and how you present yourself to the world. And Bonnie, you're talking about what you call yourself and how people perceive you — because often there's a difference between what you call yourself when you're talking to yourself and what you call yourself when you're talking to the world and your ideal clients. That's kind of what I was hearing when people told you, don't call yourself this, call yourself that. If you're a content strategist, you'd call yourself that if that's what the people you want to work with think they need. If you put that label in front of people who have no idea what it means, it wouldn't be effective — even though you could still technically say, "but I am a content strategist." So it's confusing.

Bonnie Fanning: Yeah, and I think these things are so closely related. I see what you're saying, that they're two different things, and that what you call yourself privately could differ from what you say on LinkedIn or wherever people might hire you. But there's also an element of growth in being able to call yourself the thing you want to become for other people — whereas not even having that concept, or not thinking about it, kind of limited me, and maybe limits other people too.

ilise: It's interesting — let me see if I can hold onto this thought. You said "growth," and I heard "confidence" — is that what you mean? You grow into being a content strategist, and therefore gain the confidence to put it out there, whether people understand it or not?

Bonnie Fanning: Maybe, but there's also an element of just not knowing. A lot of people, like me and others I know in this space, quit a job — whereas ilise, you've been jobless for 40 years because you've created your own thing — but a lot of us came from being an employee, and whether or not you've worked with contractors before, you may or may not know this world well. The perception is that you can quit your job and go make your own money, but we may not realize there are all these different business models within it, all these different things you can call yourself, and all these ways to be perceived. So to me it's not just confidence so much as understanding — part of the growth is just understanding the possibilities available to you.

ilise: I love that. Lisa, it looked like you had a thought.

Lisa Mullis: Bonnie, I thought you touched on something important — I see people moving from an employee role into running their own business often arrive still in that employee mode, having been in an environment where marketing and business operations were all provided for them. A lot of times, one of the first clients someone gets when they go out on their own is their former employer, or someone their employer knows. So they're still in what I'd call the hired-hand model, because they haven't yet needed to go out and generate ongoing demand for their services. I think that's important for people moving out of an employee role to be aware of — there's nothing wrong with it, it's just part of the growth Bonnie's describing, as you keep learning the different ways businesses can operate and what's available to you.

ilise: That seems like a really good segue to our next topic, actually — the messy middle. That's not a phrase I usually use, Bonnie, but I've heard you use it, and I think other people have too. Let's define it and talk about what's so messy about it. Which middle are you talking about — getting clients?

Bonnie Fanning: Probably some other middle, honestly, I don't even know.

ilise: Okay, take it where you want.

Bonnie Fanning: Well, I think this came up because we were talking about the problems we see people having landing clients — which I think is another part of growth and self-perception when you go out on your own. Part of that employee mentality that sticks around is that, as an employee, people just hand you assignments — you don't have to make it happen for yourself. When you go out on your own, freelance or whatever you want to call it, you have to make it happen yourself. When we were talking, it reminded me of a South Park episode — I don't know if anyone listening remembers it — called "Underpants Gnomes." There are these little gnomes who run around stealing underpants from the kids in South Park.

ilise: Of course — but where do they go?

Bonnie Fanning: They get stolen by the gnomes. The kids go to the gnomes' lair and ask what they're doing with all the underpants, and the gnomes say, oh, we have a three-step plan. The kids ask, what's step one? The gnomes say, step one is collect underpants. Step two is just a big question mark. Step three is profit. I think a lot of people — and I've been in this place too — feel like, well, I'm out on my own now, I'm magically going to make money, someone's going to discover me, I'm going to collect these "underpants" — your writing, your design, whatever you do — and people are just going to pay me for it. But there's that missing piece, phase two, the middle step — how are you actually going to make that happen?

ilise: Right, that's exactly how it came up — I'm remembering now. And this idea, too, of why it looks that way in our heads: okay, I'm out on my own, I'm a freelancer now, I'm free — where's the money? The way I see it manifest a lot is that people don't understand the buyer's journey — the other person's perspective on how they go from "I don't need this thing" to "oh, maybe I do need this thing," to "oh, I have to find someone to help me do this," to "oh, look, there's Bonnie, she might be the one — but I'm not ready yet." You have to understand how people come to you, and what makes them ready and willing to trust you, work with you, and pay you. That, to me, is the messy middle. So when people say, "well, I reached out to ten people and I don't have any clients yet," I think — clearly this person doesn't understand the underpants thing.

Bonnie Fanning: Well, at least they're starting to reach out to people.

ilise: Yeah, that's true.

Lisa Mullis: I see the messy middle a bit differently too — I agree there's that middle piece in landing clients, but there's also a middle that happens once you've been in business a while. Going back to what you said, Bonnie, about growth — as you come into deeper understanding of your own role and what people need, and that continues to evolve, you evolve too, and so does your business. You reach a point where everything you used to talk about, and maybe even some of the clients you worked with earlier, might not be who you want to keep working with going forward. So now you're in a situation with a mix of what I'd call legacy clients — your earlier clients — while also working with a newer type of client, and you're in the middle of shifting your positioning and messaging to attract that newer type while still enjoying the other kind. That creates its own messy middle: how do I serve both while I'm in that transition phase?

ilise: And part of the problem I see there is that people think of it in very black-and-white terms — I either have to say this, or I have to say that, I can't say all of it. I think part of navigating that messiness is being able to finesse the language on your website, in your outreach, on LinkedIn, in a way that attracts the aspirational prospects you're moving toward without alienating everyone else — so people feel included rather than excluded. Voilà.

ilise: Alright, maybe that's the end of that topic, unless either of you has more to add. Good — our third topic is outreach, because targeted outreach is one of the three tools in the Simplest Marketing Plan — the other two, I won't make you guess, are high-quality content marketing and strategic networking. I'm constantly striving to help people use all three and connect the dots between them. But outreach really is the most effective one, especially if what you need right now is income, clients, or projects. And yet, as we try to help people implement outreach — pulling together their pipeline, drafting messages, putting themselves into the messaging — we find it's an extremely painful, agonizing process for so many people, to the point they'll do almost anything to avoid it, including cleaning out the refrigerator, or other things I wouldn't want to do. We were trading stories about how we see people struggling with this and how we could help more. I'll just leave that there — who wants to respond first?

Bonnie Fanning: I'll go. I'm in the same boat as a lot of people, honestly — I'm only just starting my own outreach. I went from being an employee into that first phase Lisa described, still kind of embedded with my previous company and working with people who were contractors there. A lot of my work, and I know this happens to a lot of people, came through that connection, and it felt like, well, this will just happen forever, this is fine, I can just skate along, lucky me — but it doesn't actually work that way, you have to promote yourself. So yeah, I'm in the same boat, and it feels gross — really hard at the beginning. It's one of those things where you hate doing it, but force yourself to, and then it starts getting easier and easier the more you do it, and you start to realize none of it really matters that much — it's a volume game you're playing, and a long game. You say, ilise, all the time, that you're planting seeds, and none of those seeds are the be-all-end-all seed. I think a lot of us think of it that way, like, oh, this one person — I'm either going to embarrass myself in front of them or work really hard to get this one person to pay attention to me and hire me. But that one person is just one of many, many seeds you need to be planting.

ilise: What do you think, Lisa?

Lisa Mullis: I've been doing outreach for a very long time, and I still find it one of the hardest types of marketing to do, because you're closest to the "no." With direct outreach, you're closest to someone ignoring you — and it feels very personal when you're ignored, or literally told no. Most of the time, honestly, it's silence — you're met with silence, and in that silence you fill in all kinds of stories, and it really messes with your head. The way I like to think about why outreach feels hard — because it feels hard differently for different people — is to identify where the friction point actually is. Is it operational? Technical? Or some kind of mindset or emotional thing? For many of us it's a combination, but once you drill in and ask, am I missing a system, is that why it's hard — or am I stuck in "tool town," is that why — or is it that I'm genuinely worried about rejection or exposure — once you pinpoint it more specifically, that's helpful, because then you have something concrete to address. Though sometimes I see people getting stuck in tool town or systems because they're actually terrified on the emotional end — they're all interconnected.

Bonnie Fanning: Totally — it's a lot more comfortable to be stuck in something you feel like you can solve than to be putting yourself out there.

ilise: Right. And one of the things we talked about earlier too is that there are many different reasons people avoid their marketing, whether outreach or networking or whatever — and one of them, honestly, is that they don't actually want the work. They think they want the work, but they really don't. Sometimes that's because they've never actually done it before, so they're not sure they could — and if they do land a client, they have to deliver, or it feels really bad, and that's what they're trying to avoid. There are just so many reasons, layer upon layer — it's a big onion — and I think all we can do is work with the person in front of us to figure out what it is for them, and then help them over that obstacle, and the next one, and the next one, until, like Bonnie said, you're just doing it. And the more you do it, the easier it gets, until you reach a point where it doesn't even matter anymore — you can just send 25 outreach messages right now, and why not, and 25 more tomorrow.

Bonnie Fanning: I'm glad you said that — I've heard a lot of people in your groups say they're afraid they won't be able to deliver, and that's one of those big looming fears. One thing I've been doing, as many people here know, is turning it around and almost striving for rejection — or pulling it all the way to the project phase. Like, I know I'm going to deliver something — if it's not up to their standards, or not a fit, then it's not a fit, and that's okay. At least up to that point, I've gained all the experience of reaching out, doing the contract, sending samples, everything along that journey — you learn it as you go. Once you've done it a couple of times, each little piece gets a bit easier and faster to deliver. I think about it like riding a bike, or learning to drive — if you remember the very first time, maybe when you were getting your license, it was terrifying, wobbly — I failed my driving test multiple times. If you think back, I guarantee all of us have these experiences of doing something hard for the first few times, terrifying at first, and now you look back and it feels second nature. That's kind of what you're both describing — now you can just say, sure, I'll send out those outreach messages, no big deal. But the first few times — I never thought I'd spend my whole career as a marketer, doing outreach all the time. That's not what I expected, because I didn't like that stuff at all in the beginning.

Bonnie Fanning: I'm glad you said that — I have similar feelings. I feel like sometimes you have to become kind of a new person in order to do this stuff regularly and run this kind of business. You may not even be able to picture yourself as that kind of person at first, but the more you do it, the more you slowly become that person over time.

ilise: And that's exactly what I mean when I talk about using your business as a laboratory for your own personal growth — because you become, I'd say, a better person, a stronger person, someone who isn't afraid of things that really don't matter.

Bonnie Fanning: So true. I just think that's super helpful.

ilise: Alright — I'm being told it's time for us to wrap up, so I think this is a good place to put the bookmark. We should definitely continue this conversation, if not over donuts and coffee, then certainly virtually like this. I want to thank you both, Lisa and Bonnie — why don't you tell people where they can find you online, since everyone likes to connect — and then I'll thank you again.

Lisa Mullis: You can find me on LinkedIn — just Google Lisa Mullis — or reach out to me through my website, or at lisa@paraphrasecom.com.

ilise: Beautiful, and you, Bonnie?

Bonnie Fanning: Find me on LinkedIn, Bonnie Fanning, and please connect with me — I love connecting with anyone and everyone, especially ilise's community.

ilise: Awesome, beautiful. Alright, ladies, thank you so much, and we'll talk again soon.

Lisa Mullis: Thanks, ilise.

Bonnie Fanning: Thank you.

---

ilise: I hope you had as much fun as we did during that chat, and maybe even learned a little something too. If you want my help figuring all this out, take advantage of my free mentoring session. You can find that, and lots more resources including the Simplest Marketing Plan, at marketing-mentor.com. Enjoy, and I'll see you next time.

 

* This article was originally published here