The Business of Being Free — Post 2

What I Know About My Worth — And Why I Stopped Proving It to the Wrong Rooms

Enjoying a stroll in Antalya Turkiye

This is Post 2 of The Business of Being Free — a series about running a real company as a digital nomad. If you're just finding this, start with Post 1.

I have never undercharged for my work.

I want to say that clearly because it is the foundation of everything that follows. In twenty-five years of building my agency — with barely any advertising (I sprinkled on some Google ads, Facebook ads, and LinkedIn ads in the beginning- and like any type of insurance- I saw what a rip off it all was); without the types of platforms we have today, without a single cold email for the first two decades — I signed clients and lost them in roughly equal measure, and the ones I lost were almost always lost for the same reason: I wouldn't move on price.

When They Assume You Need The Work

I was stereotyped constantly. Young. A woman. Latina. A mother (if they happened to find out — I've always been very private about my personal life). The assumption, spoken or implied, was that I needed the work badly enough to negotiate. I didn't. I never did. I established my value at the beginning and held it, and the clients who understood what they were buying stayed for years. Some of them are still with me.

That is not luck. That is twenty-five years of refusing to enter rooms where my presence was conditional on discounting myself.

I watched my mother deal with situations that no one should ever go through just because she fit the same profile. And this was in progressive California at the time. I heard stories from my aunt across the country in Florida — much worse than California when it came to racism. The put downs and condescending treatment of me was not going to get anywhere…

…and, what do you know?

When you respect yourself, others are forced to respect you. Otherwise their intentions start to show like crayons on a coloring book.

The Freelance Platform Experiment

For the first five years I hired typical Americans looking for work the traditional way. For the rest of it — when I decided to go global to find better work ethics (more on that later) — I used platforms exclusively to hire: bookkeepers, assistants, specialists. Not to find clients. I had my own channels, my own reputation, my own network. They worked.

In 2023 I decided to test a freelance marketplace as a client acquisition channel. It worked, initially. I picked up several accounts with minimal effort and my team absorbed them efficiently. So efficiently, in fact, that most of these clients had no idea they were working with an agency at all. They thought they had hired a single freelancer. My team handled everything. I reviewed, oversaw, and delivered. The clients were happy. The accounts ran themselves.

Then something shifted in the marketplace. What had been a professional channel became saturated — flooded with a new generation of providers willing to work for rates that would not cover a single hour of my team's time. The gig economy, which those of us in the USA helped build since the nineties, was being rediscovered by people who have no memory of building it and no interest in the standards that made it work.

The race to the bottom was audible. I didn't join it. But I watched it change the room entirely.

When Clients Discover You Have a Team

Recently, three of my small platform accounts ended within a short window — not because of the work, which was excellent, but because the clients discovered I had a team.

Let that sit for a moment.

The work was done. The files were accurate. The books were current. The deliverables were everything they had paid for and more. But the discovery that dedicated bookkeepers and an assistant were involved — that there was infrastructure behind the result — was, for some clients, a reason to leave (one of them I announced it to them- it was too much liability for the small fee).

One of them pulled one platform’s activity logs and used them to argue that the work had only taken minutes, therefore the billing was unjustified. She had thanked me in writing, months earlier, for maintaining her file during the six months she spent ignoring it herself. The dispute came the moment I announced a transition to flat fee pricing. I declined the refund she requested and documented the exchange accordingly. She even attempted to trade her review for a refund — which is against the platform's own policy.

I am not angry about any of this. What those exits and many in the past have always told me is very useful: these were not the right clients for me. The right clients don't leave when they find out you have a team. First of all, they’re happy about your growth and second, they see the bigger picture of someone always taking care of their financials 365 days per year.

The same dynamic that plays out in client relationships has a longer, older history in the rooms closer to home — but that conversation deserves its own space.

Going Back to What Built This Business

I have turned the platform profile private and I am going back to the method that built this business for the first twenty years of its existence — direct outreach to companies that fit my criteria, are willing to pay for expertise, and already serious enough about the need to act on it.

That is the room I was built for. Not a bidding war. A conversation between professionals — expertise and experience exchanged for what they're actually worth.

The client roster is leaner right now than it has been in some time. I will not pretend otherwise. This is because I don’t hold anyone’s hand anymore. I don’t deal with people who want to extract your soul for a few dollars. People who don’t appreciate experience and wisdom and what you have obviously built from the ground up. From the outside, that might look like a precarious position for someone running a business from a temporary rental in Türkiye while planning a road trip from south to north Turkiye, and their next stop to South Korea.

From the inside? It looks like a runway.

What Is Actually Being Built

Yari Solutions is my cash engine — the twenty-one-year-old machine that funds everything else. But it is not the only thing running.

Under the management company I have been building quietly for years, there are subsidiaries at various stages: a content and financial education venture for women, a second venture currently in development that I'm not ready to name yet, my son's fitness and coaching company — which he built solely on his own but I'm partnering with him to help him scale — and a day trading operation that I've kept small but is growing.

None of these are accidents. All of them are intentional.

The management company is designed to become a [unclassified] — a family office that generates, tests, and scales multiple revenue streams rather than depending on any single one.

I didn't grow any of my businesses or projects on debt. I operated bootstrap. But I did get into a little debt for the first time last year. I climbed out within a few months. I rebuilt. I am currently sitting on a cliff in Türkiye, visa expiring in June, planning my road trip through Turkiye, and 4th visit to South Korea with an adult child and an 80-pound three-legged dog, managing a team across time zones, and launching a new content series.

This is not chaos. This is architecture.

The Part About Trust

Twenty-one years of building through hard things earns you something that cannot be invoiced or listed on a service menu. It earns you a specific kind of knowing — the knowledge, held in the body, that you have been here before and you did not collapse. In fact, each and every time something beautiful and extraordinary comes out of it. Something unexpected. Bigger than what I dreamed of.

I have faced harder situations. I have rebuilt from worse. I do not panic because panic has never once solved a cash flow problem or signed a client or moved a business forward. What moves things forward is clarity, outreach, and the willingness to keep building even when the current numbers don't yet reflect what you know is coming.

The Universe, in my experience, rewards the builders who don't stop.

I keep on building.

This is Post 2 of The Business of Being Free. Miss Post 1? Start here: What It Actually Takes to Run a 20-Year Business From Anywhere in the World.

STAY IN THE LOOP:

🔵 Next Up: The Business of Being Free — Post 3

• For the Mindset & Finances: Gather knowledge with our digital products in the store or expand with a course.

• For the Money: Build a business that can operate on the Frontier- Sophisticated Business Strategies or get support to architect your world.

📩 Stay Notified

The "algorithm" is part of the old Piscean control system. To make sure you don't miss a "download," sign up below to get these posts delivered directly to your inbox.