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If you're a food and drink brand and your product isn't performing the way it should, maybe the sales have slowed down or the review. Keep mentioning that the taste is not that great. I have created something to help you. It's called the Flavor Blueprint. It's a free guide that based on the process I use with my clients to fix their underperforming products.
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If you're tired of guessing and you want clarity before another batch, download your free flavor blueprint. If you want to create food or drink products that actually taste amazing, get the repeat purchases and see your sales go up.
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You need the flavor strategy. I'm Manon Galizzi, food scientist and flavor expert. And in this podcast I share what I've learned from helping food and drink brands create new products from scratch. Choose the right flavor direction or fix the flavors that are not working. Welcome to another episode of my 30 days podcast challenge.
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Today's episode is going to be a little bit more personal and I wanted to explain my struggles and what I gained since I became a solopreneur. The first one is the emotional and, mental freedom. One of the things I hated the most when I was an employee was having meetings after meetings, after meetings, a meeting to prepare the meeting, to prepare the meeting, to prepare the meeting.
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Sometimes I ended up having a whole day of meeting and that happened to so many of my colleagues. Seven hours back to back to back of meetings. And then your manager asking you, why did you not have time to do this? I've asked you to do that. Where is this?
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Like, how on earth am I supposed to do my job when my day is full of, of meeting? And have you been to these meetings as well where you just ask yourself, what the am I here for? Why am I here? There's some meetings you wish you were invited and you were not.
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And some meetings you're invited and you feel like this is a bloody waste, of my time. Right. Anyway, so now I can choose who I want to have meeting with. I can say no. I can select when I have meetings.
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So I tend to have meetings around lunchtime because with my insomnia, the afternoons are very much a struggle for me. I guess everyone is a struggle in the afternoon, most people anyway. But I have to be a bit more mindful of this.
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So I want to be at my best. I want to be fresher. And I am an early bird, so I don't mind waking up. Usually I wake up around 5:30. I do my gym exercises and I pump myself, prepare Myself and start around 8 to 8:30.
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But then I like having my morning to do my most important job. So it will be trials, it will be content creation. It will be something that really require a lot of my brain. So then I like having meetings around lunchtime so I can have a break.
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I'm still full of energy, but at least I can decide when and where and with who I can have these meetings. I also learned a lot about myself and about my triggers. I came across a lot of prospects and clients that I realized were really triggering to me so that come back to understanding your trauma.
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So I have a cptsd. So it's a PTSD complex that come from childhood. And I'm doing EMDR since this year. And it has been a very interesting journey. Very liberating and empowering journey. Very hard.
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Don't know if you've done EMDR before. It's tough when you do the sessions, but then you learn so much. So that journey really put me through a lot of triggers, a lot of shadows, a lot of things that I didn't really know about myself.
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So I really thanks all of this horrible person that came in my journey. Very difficult and challenging prospects and customers because at the end of the day they put the light on something that I didn't know about myself and I had to work on and reflect.
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So I thanked them for that. And that also allows me to find the customers I really wanted to work with. With people who like learning and ask questions, are curious. There is a respect and the trust between us.
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They want to do something that is good for the planet and for people. They want something that is much more clean label having no adjectives at all. And they invite me on that journey with them. I almost feel like I am part of their business and we are doing this work together.
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Then it was also from an employee to a consultant and a business owner was to know how to put boundaries and say no. Especially when you are the beginning and you want to say yes to everything, everything that people ask for.
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And then you end up in bad situation where you don't make any money and you're actually losing money and you do things you don't really want to do. So it has made me realize a lot of things as well about myself and my people pleaser tendency.
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So I had to put boundaries, I had to say no. I needed to know my worth to be able to say no to certain people. But of course it's easier when you have customers coming at You.
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But even sometimes for big money, I had to say no, even though I needed the money. But I just thought what is more important and more important, the money coming in or my mental health? Because I know if I take that customer in, yes, I will have loads of money, but my mental health is going to go downhill and I can't have that.
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So he has put me through a lot of difficult choices like that. And listening to my gut, knowing myself with my insomnia, with what I'm going through with cptsd, I have to be kind to myself.
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I have to listen to my gut and think it's either I spend all of my time and my energy on that clients that really trigger me and it's not worth it, or I can actually use this time and energy focusing on finding customers I really want to work with.
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Another thing was for me was to recognize when I needed help. So I tend to do everything, I mean everything by myself. Especially now it's so easy. You can look on Instagram or on YouTube for any guidance on anything.
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So for my business I did exactly the same. I built the website by myself, I did the marketing, the content creation. I've just done everything myself. Having some training of course, but I just wanted to prove to myself and maybe to others I was capable of doing it.
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And then at one point I just realized I actually can't do everything by myself. That just no way I can focus fully on clients and content creation and business strategy and marketing and all of this to do all the time that that was just not possible.
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So it was also me being able to recognize I needed help on some aspects of the business if I wanted to keep on having customers and growth. And one of the things that have been the most beneficial for me and my business was regularly I tried to do that every three months is to have a little bit of a breather and having an analytical point of view on my business and myself.
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What is working, why it's not working. So a little bit of looking at my business in the bigger picture seeing everything and see what is working even in terms of my energy and my time. How am I feeling doing this service?
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So in few months ago I realized I had about nine services. Now I've down to three, which is the one I speak quite often. The three packages I've created which is create, choose and fix.
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I try to simplify things, I try to automate things and I still have to automate more, more and more. And I also try to reduce this perfectionists Thinking, oh, if that post look perfect, if it has the right colors, the right text, then it will work fine.
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I could literally spend, I'm not lying, one hour on one post on LinkedIn or Instagram. I've spent hours and hours, and at some point I was thinking, I'm not a content creator. I am a consultant.
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This is what I do. I'm a product developer. I'm a food scientist. I help my clients. I'm not a content creator. So now I just write down, I just ask ChatGPT to correct a little bit my sentences because, you know, it's not my first language, as I am French.
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So just correcting some expressions I'm using wrong, some of my wording maybe, and correct my grammar and how I spell. Spell a few words, but that's all I do. Nowadays I just post it like it doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter.
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And especially all of the colors and the things, like it doesn't matter. No one give a crap about the exact color I've used. And if my Instagram, greed look perfect and, oh, it doesn't matter.
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So they are the main things that I learned through being, a solopreneur. And how to transition from an employee to a solopreneur was also a lot of jiggling to do because I was acting like one of my previous boss.
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Oh, yes, and you're not working enough. Oh, you do breaks. And I was like, what the hell? Why am I talking to myself like that? It was really like a. A manager was in my head. And I was like, I'm not an employee anymore. I do whatever I want. If I'm completely exhausted, I am allowed to take the afternoon off.
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I am the captain of my ship. I do whatever I want. And if I'm very exhausted, I have to listen to myself. Otherwise that happens to me when I didn't. And oh, my God, I end up doing so many mistakes.
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And I, confused myself. I was too tired. It's like, stop, stop. I'm not productive. So if you're also a solopreneur, let me know in the comment. What did you discovered about yourself? What did you gain the most from being a solopreneur?
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That would be very lovely to hear, from you, because sometimes being a solopreneur is quite lonely if you don't have other solopreneurs around. So having this kind of conversation, I think, is always important from one solopreneur to another and have this community of.
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You're not the only one. I've been through a lot of roller coasters of one day you are fine, the next day you just want to give up everything. So let me know in the comment. I would be absolutely thrilled to read what worked for you, what you learned about yourself and if you are a food and drink business, you can find all of my tips around tasting food flavors and project development in my newsletter.
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So don't forget to subscribe and I will see you tomorrow for another episode. Bye.
