[00:00:01.100] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
Hey, everyone, Rachel here from Visualization Freak, the podcast. I am so excited. This is my first ever podcast, so forgive me as I start learning how to make this work the right way. Today, I kind of want to just introduce myself and give you some insight into how I am where I am today. What this whole podcast is about and what I’m planning on doing going forward. My story starts back way back in like 2006.
[00:00:35.790] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
But we’re not going to go all the way back there today. But I want to talk about how I became an accidental success. I guess you can say accidentally on purpose, we’ll call it. Back in 2013, my husband and I started a web design firm in Charlotte, NC. I’ve always done web design my whole life, pretty much my whole adult career. I’ve been a website developer and I knew I wanted to get back into it.
[00:01:07.600] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
I had freelanced for a very long time. I was pregnant with my third daughter at the time. So I was looking for something. I wanted to stay home. I wanted to be able to, you know, raise her. And so I started to go ahead and get back on the idea of. Starting a website company. So I started in 2013. I got my first client right away, and it was actually Charlotte Jewish News out here in Charlotte and I worked with Amy there.
[00:01:47.360] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
She was awesome. It got my juices flowing again to be back in business, you know, because I had stopped freelancing for a while and I was kind of just being pregnant. So once I got the taste again of doing it and being back in that feeling place of creating. And if you’re a creative person, you know that zone, it’s so easy to I guess get caught up in that feeling of creating and forgetting about, gosh, I really have to start marketing this to get more clients.
[00:02:22.860] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
The way I got her was through, I believe, Thumbtack at the time. She was asking for a web designer. I answered. We clicked. I got her. So after her, probably two months went by or so and I didn’t try to get any more clients. You know, this was a nice amount of money that I made off this project. So it wasn’t like I needed it. I want to talk about the feast or famine cycle, because this is it right here. Where you get a new client and then you feast. And then all of a sudden you’re like, oh, crap, I need a new client to make more money. I need to find a new client now. So this is the famine now. You don’t have enough money. You don’t and you become more desperate.
[00:03:06.150] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
Thankfully, at the time, my husband was working full time. And so it wasn’t desperation necessarily. It was more of I want to do this. I want to really do it this time, not just have it and say like, oh, you know, I’m a freelancer. I want to be an actual business. So from there,the I put it out there to God. You can call it the Universe, source, whatever you call it. But it’s God, for me, it’s God I put out to God. I said God, listen, this is what I want. I want to have a successful web design firm. I want to be able to take care of my family. I want to be able to work from anywhere and have the freedom to raise my children and work and do the things that I want to do on my own terms.
[00:03:55.400] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
So that’s how it started. It started with a request. And nothing happened right away. Nothing happened at all. And we’re going into 2014 now. And I was putting it out like feelers out there. I was spending so much time editing my own website, thinking like, that’s the problem. I have to keep fixing this. So finally, I got to a point where. I was like you know what? I don’t even want to do this anymore.
[00:04:26.090] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
I hate marketing. I hate selling myself. I hate putting myself out there. I’m competing with, you know, outsource workers who are charging not even a third of what I charge. So this is just stressful. I don’t want this anymore. You know, so I pretty much nulled out my request. You know what? I just don’t even want this. I went to sleep that night feeling defeated, feeling like, oh, my gosh, this is just ridiculous.
[00:04:56.770] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
This is 2014. I went to bed and I’m like, I don’t even know anymore. I don’t even know what I’m doing with my life like everyone else around me is successful. They’re doing their own thing. I’m 30 years old now. What the hell, Rachel? Come on. You know, get your crap together. But, I think it was in that moment of, you know what? I’m just done. You know that I gained the most clarity I would say over that next week.
[00:05:29.740] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
I started to kind of just chill being done with everything and not even try to make it work. And from there it was like I saw that Microsoft and Adobe, they started doing this thing where, you know, they were selling their software. So Microsoft Word, Excel, you know, their whole office suite, Adobe was Photoshop, Illustrator. But instead of selling the program for the, you know, seven hundred to a thousand dollars that it used to be, they’re now offering it at a monthly subscription.
[00:06:08.560] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
Something cool. This is awesome, now I can upgrade my Photoshop, which had been using, like the CS version for years and I’m like, good. I need the newest one. It’s like 10 bucks a month. So that’s like a no brainer. I’m like, okay, I don’t have to plop down a thousand dollars or two thousand dollars to get this new software. I could spend 10 bucks a month. Makes my life easier. I’ll get the newest software all the time.
[00:06:31.450] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
It felt great. And all of a sudden that just sparked in me. And I’m like, what if I could apply that to my business? And so I did. I’m not going to go into all the details, you know, I am putting together a group coaching for web designers that want to learn this method. I mean, it’s such a cool way to get clients to get off this rat race of trying to get new clients every month.
[00:07:00.660] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
Amazing. But I started implementing this idea into my business and. OK, so I can say it took off, but literally it did not. It took about another two years for us to see any real traction. So I’m going to be completely honest. It was not overnight, but it was just a simple thought of this idea. It was a lot of structuring things definitely and getting out of my head where I had been for so long.
[00:07:29.520] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
Saying like, oh, you know, how can I charge this much or how can I make the kind of money that I want to make or who am I to do this? I mean, there are so many limiting beliefs that I had to overcome just to get where I am today. And so in 2016, I call that the year of full-blown spaghetti dinners, spaghetti and meat sauce dinners and peanut butter and jelly sandwich lunches, because my husband lost his job at the end of 2015.
[00:08:07.040] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
So 2016. We went into this world of like. I’m actually supporting my family now on nothing. You know, really no income at that point. So I remember my husband’s going on job interview after job interview and it just wasn’t it wasn’t clicking. And he came home one day and he looked at me and he said, You know what, Rachel? I’m not doing this anymore. He said we are meant to be bigger and better and do more and make a difference.
[00:08:40.770] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
Screw it. We’re going to make this work. That was 2016. OK. That was when we made the commitment to this. This wasn’t just a freelance thing because I was still treating it like a freelance business. This was no longer a freelance business. This was a real business. And we started to take it seriously. So at the time, I had clients already. So, OK, so I won’t say it wasn’t a success because I was making about probably like twenty-five hundred dollars a month recurring revenue.
[00:09:12.970] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
But we were family five, so that’s not a lot. And literally, we lived on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and spaghetti and meat sauce. We joined the Y over that summer so that my kids had something to do and we would go swimming and it was just a crazy time. That was the year we got married. So we paying for our wedding as well. It was just insane. I think back and I’m like, God, thank you so much for everything you’ve done for us since that moment and since we made the commitment.
[00:09:47.390] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
So I want to talk about that. All of it. When you make a decision, when you commit to something and not in the you know way of like, yeah, I want to do this, but as soon as there’s a but in there, you’re not really committed. When you start saying, I want to do this and I’m going to figure out any possible way I can do this. That’s commitment. That’s when you make a decision. And when you make a decision, all of a sudden things will start happening in your favor.
[00:10:22.260] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
When you make a real decision, when you commit to whatever your goal is, whatever it does matter. I don’t care how big, how small. It doesn’t matter when you commit. That is when it’s like all of a sudden you have this energy around you that changes, you can almost feel it.
[00:10:41.380] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
If it’s a real commitment, you will feel it. It’s like, OK, I felt it that day that my husband came my way. It wasn’t my husband the time. But, you know, he came home and he said. That’s it. We’re done. We’re doing this. We are going to we’re going to make this work. And we freakin did. The whole 2016 was literally peanut butter sandwiches, spaghetti, meat sauce. But we built a business.
[00:11:12.550] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
My second point is find someone around you who can support your dream. Support your vision, because this is my vision. My husband has no experience in this world. He would like to say he’s a great designer, but he’s not. And this was all me. This was him supporting my vision and him taking it on as his own. And we worked together for years until. We’ll get to that later. But so this is where we were at 2016.
[00:11:43.440] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
We got married and then. It was just a really difficult year. I won’t say it was easy, but it was probably the year I learned the most about myself, about who I am, about what I’m capable of. And it literally changed my life. So going into 2017 now, we were a successful business. We were probably at that point bringing in about 5000 dollars a month, maybe a little bit more than five thousand dollars a month, you know.
[00:12:20.460] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
Which is still not amazing. But in my terms of, you know, we doubled our income at that point. So it took us a year. We doubled our income, our monthly revenue. And then. We started looking for office space. That was our next move. OK, we’re going to look for an office because if we’re going to grow this thing, we’re going to do it the right way. We start looking for an office space.
[00:12:42.730] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
And once again, it was you know, we were making five thousand dollars. Yes. We kept our income. You know, our expenses low. We were very vigilant in making sure that, you know, we didn’t have a lot of credit card debt. We paid off our car. We literally had little to no expenses except for rent, food and stuff like that. From there. I went to go see an office space, and I remember this moment so vividly.
[00:13:17.680] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
We went to go see an office space. I think they wanted like a thousand dollars a month for it. We looked into it. We loved it. Oh my gosh. If you had seen the space, it was awesome. Beautiful brick interior, you know, with, like, the whitewashed look and everything right up my alley. But we went to go see it and it was like just not going to work out. I mean, with everything we would have to pay for the lighting.
[00:13:42.170] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
We would, you know, electricity, we would have to pay for Internet. We would have to pay for anything else like phones. So this is going to probably be upwards in fifteen hundred dollars a month rent. And I couldn’t justify that. There was no way. You know, I get if you want to make money, you have to spend money. But this was just unnecessary. You know. So from there, we were a little defeated.
[00:14:05.750] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
I’m going to say that day when we walked out, because it is such a beautiful spot. We just said, you know what? Let’s go to lunch. Let’s forget about this whole thing. Let’s just go and do our thing and we’ll we’ll figure it out, right. God, this is what we want. We want a nice office space in a super affordable price range that we can grow our business. So from there, we went to lunch and then I got a phone call from a current client said, Hey, Rachel, I’m ready.
[00:14:36.840] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
I need a new website. Can you get started as soon as possible? Stop by my office today. Pick up the check and we’ll get started. Cool. No problem. Great. Thank you, God. This is a great you know, another client added to the list. So I went to his office and. If you know me personally, I am a. I’m shy, but not in the traditional shy way, it’s takes me a little bit to warm up to you.
[00:15:08.210] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
So if I know you really well then I talk a lot. A lot. But if I’m just getting to know you and I don’t feel comfortable with you, then I really close up a lot. I don’t really share. And while this was an existing client, we didn’t have the rapport like we have now, obviously. But at the time, he was only our client for maybe three, four months. So I didn’t really know him that well.
[00:15:36.420] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
But I walked into his office and he said to me, like, you know, hey, Rachel, what’s going on? How are you doing? And I felt the nudge. I felt the urge in my gut to tell him what we were going through, like what our issue was. And, you know, I know now, like, when you have those feelings, those gut instincts, you have to follow them. You have to trust them.
[00:16:03.910] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
So I laid it out for him like, listen. We went to go see this office space. It was beautiful. We can’t afford that right now. You know, we’re just building the business. I don’t want to spend a lot for an office and blah blah blah. So I told him the whole story. Like the look on his face, he just like perked up, was like his eyes widened. And he’s says, You’re looking for office space?
[00:16:29.730] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
I said – Yeah. He’s says listen, come upstairs, I mean, right now. I have the full office upstairs. Not just a little office. It was receptionist, our own bathroom, a conference room. He was like, if you like it, you can have it. It’s yours. You can paint, do whatever you want up there for whatever you want to pay. And I looked at him like you’re serious? And he was like yeah whatever you want to pay, he goes, and well, it’ll be including electric. You can use our Internet. I was like whoa, what kind of world did I just step into. This is amazing. You know what I knew about the law of attraction. And I we’ll talk about that on later episodes because I do talk a lot about the law of attraction, because it has changed my life, literally. But at that moment, it was like, oh, my gosh.
[00:17:22.260] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
So, I said to him, Yeah, we’ll take it. This is what we want to pay. We’ll take it. He gave me the keys and we’re ready to go. And I walked outside to my husband. I’m like, well, we just secured office space. He was like, what? It was just a great reminder. To trust that intuition, trust my gut feeling when it comes up for you and says, hey, you know, you should maybe you should say something or maybe, you know, this is the path for you or someone says something.
[00:17:49.190] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
And all of a sudden you kind of spark up like, wait, what did you say? That’s exactly what I needed to hear at this moment. So that’s kind of where I was at at that moment. So once we moved into the office, it became like clockwork. We were getting clients consistently building our our business. By two thousand and nineteen, we became a six figure company. I’m so proud of where we’ve come from. It’s been a ride, I will tell you that it’s been a ride.
[00:18:18.320] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
But when I say that it was accidental. I want to stress that it was accidentally on purpose. We did barely any marketing. We didn’t. I mean, there’s so many courses out there right now teaching you how to do stuff, you know, and Facebook ads. And I mean, we we dabbled in stuff, but we never committed to any of that. We were just like, you know what? And this is where I I said it a lot.
[00:18:48.270] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
You know, John would go to networking groups. He would kind of hang out. His day was one day a week. He would go out to a group and say hi to everyone. We didn’t get a lot of business from it. That was his way of like going out and doing something. But most of our business came through visualization. I would visualize a successful company, I would visualize myself running a successful company always.
[00:19:19.260] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
And when I had the doubts. Like, this isn’t working. I would just be like, cancel. I would pretend there’s a cancel button there. I would reset it. And I would say, no, I am the owner of a six figure company. And it happened accidentally on purpose. We made it work and we and literally we have hardly any overhead expense. We run this. You know, I have eight people on my team now who help me out.
[00:19:50.240] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
I am in the process right now. So 2019 was a crazy year I mean we had numbers that were insane and for me, it was a big confirmation that what I’m doing is right. But I also fell into that trap of doing a lot myself, you know, and I struggled with moving forward in my business and not being everything in my business. And I am a recovering perfectionist. I am a recovering, non delegator. So it was very hard for me to let go and to let other people help.
[00:20:30.620] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
So we became almost yeah, things were great. I was making money, but it was just like sucking my soul dry. So I made some bad decisions in 2019. Nothing that I’m proud of. I began drinking a little bit more often than I should and it was almost like that was my rock bottom. That was the moment where I was like, OK, I understand now. Money isn’t everything. Doing well isn’t everything, you know. It’s more of.
[00:21:03.930] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
Being happy, being content, being satisfied with who you are, where you are in life is the most important thing. And so I really started to dig deep into who I am, how I do things. I begin to question who I am. I took the Myers Brigg’s personality test just to kind of figure out who I am. I did a self-analysis on YOU science, which is amazing. It’s almost like because like with Myers Briggs and a lot of these personalities tests, you can kind of trick them by choosing the answer you think you should choose.
[00:21:36.790] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
But with YOU science – you couldn’t. It was like playing these games and they kind of. Showed you who you are. And it was amazing. But I took that and I realized like I’m here to do a lot more than just design websites. I’m here to do a lot more than just being here. Just being present. I want to be an inspirational teacher. So this is me putting it out there.
[00:22:08.810] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
This is my goal for like 2020 now. It’s been crazy. But going forward, I want to teach people. I want to lead by example to show you my flaws. Show you the things that I’ve screwed up at and kind of help you learn by the most from my mistakes, you know? And this is where Visualization Freak was born. You know, I really the beginning of I heard a coach, the beginning of 2020, in March right before the pandemic.
[00:22:40.340] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
I hired a business coach and we spent three months together. Exploring the different what ifs, like, what if I did something different? What if I became this? What if I can do this? And it was like the best time of my life. We had so much fun together. Shout out to Janette from Resonant Joy. She is amazing. And it was just like an eye opener for me. Where? I use visualization in every part of my life.
[00:23:11.210] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
You know, I use the Law of Attraction and coming from a church background, a Christian background. It was really hard for me to embrace this part of me because I felt like, you know. But I realized it’s God. It’s nothing different for me. And so what I was able to embrace who I am. I visualize a lot. I am a Pisces. I am a daydreamer on purpose. Like I do it without even realizing I do it.
[00:23:37.910] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
I can get lost in my thoughts. So for me, it’s a superpower. It’s it’s my biggest talent. It’s my biggest natural God given ability. And when I embrace that part of me. Things just changed this year for me. I got so clear on what I’m meant to do, you know, so again, Visualization Freak is part of that. This podcast is part of that. But I mean, there’s so much bigger going on that I’m working on right now, you know?
[00:24:07.360] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
So this is a little introduction to who I am. My plan for this podcast is this is what I love doing. I love talking. I love talking about my life. I love talking about the things that I can help with, the lessons I’ve learned. So that’s my goal with this. You know, I have four pillars that I stand by. So Law of Attraction is a big one. So I talk about visualization, scripting, mindset, all that stuff.
[00:24:34.540] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
Secondly, is goals, I’m big on goals. So goal setting, choosing the right goals in your life. Really diving into business goals. My third pillar is self-improvement. You know? Personal development is huge for me. I mean, I live my life on self-help stuff. You know, whenever I have a problem, I go deep. I’m like, okay, let’s figure this out. I am my own coach half the time. So things that I learn, books that I read.
[00:25:08.730] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
I have moments I want to share. Those three as well as being a rebel. I have a whole idea for a series on being authentic, being your most true self. And I hate the word authentic and I hate even using it because I feel like if you’re in the business world, you have seen it used all over overused. I think where it’s like so I call it more become a rebel like. Do it your own way, do it the way you want, and everything else will follow.
[00:25:40.860] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
So that’s the four pillars that I stand by. That’s the four things I kind of wanna talk about on this podcast as much as possible. This is new this is new to me. I’m learning along the way. So if you have any recommendations, any ideas, things that you want me to share, please let me know. You can reach out to me at Visualization Freak on Instagram. You can do me there or you can reach out to my website VisualizationFreak.com.
[00:26:06.270] – Rachel W. (The Visualization Freak)
I look forward to hearing from you and I look forward to helping you on your journey as much as possible. So this is me signing out. Rachel Woods from Visualization Freak.
