We recently connected with Sarah Loughry and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Sarah, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
Resilience is defined as the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
Being a woman in the workforce almost guarantees that you will face some sort of adversity. We are still fighting an uphill battle–doomed by our uterus before getting a real chance. Bouncing back quickly is our only option. Like many others, I started in a male-dominated industry that required me to take a backseat to high-level conversations, understand my experience and knowledge wasn’t valued, and have a non-reaction to mysogenistic behavior. Did I accept it? No. My version of fighting back was sucking all the experience I could out of the job so that I could easily step to the next role.
I eventually went to freelance work, and in a very non-linear journey, ended up opening my own content agency. It was the foundation that was set in my corporate life and by being a woman that prepared me for entrepreneurship. Resilience is a part of owning and managing a business. There are days that I think about giving it all up. There are days where I hear no more than once.
But then I remind myself that less than 5% of small businesses hit $1m in revenue. And even a smaller percentage are female-owned. I want to be part of the change. And that means bouncing back. That means doing better.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
Em Dash Content Studio is a boutique team of writers and strategists that help businesses show up on search and establish themselves as thought leaders in their space.
I started Em Dash Content Studio when I noticed a major gap between optimized content and quality content. With my foundation as a writer and my learned expertise in SEO, I set out to help businesses show up on Google with engaging, valuable, and memorable content. Three years later, we are able to curate full content strategies aimed at driving organic traffic to specific sites and pages.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
1. Narrow your focus- When I first started, I had a tendency to take on any work, even if it meant going out of my area of expertise. I even worked on a PR campaign for a bit! I learned very quickly that I needed to stay in my lane. I’d rather provide a ton of value within content then 50% in other areas. Sometimes that means losing potential clients. But it’s worth it. 2. Make sure clients are aligned- I’ve only just learned how to identify red flags with new clients. It’s REALLY hard to turn down potential business. But, if a client doesn’t value what you do, doesn’t trust you, and/or doesn’t respect your team, it’s not worth it. Morale can quickly get killed by one bad client. Protect your people.
3. Involve your team in hiring new people- As I said above, morale is everything. Your team can be the difference of scaling your business or bringing it down. It’s important everyone vibes well together. I was forced to eliminate a member of the team who just wasn’t working from a communication standpoint. The difference afterward was palpable.
Before we go, any advice you can share with people who are feeling overwhelmed?
When I’m overwhelmed, I ask myself my biggest stressors and write them down. I then go down the list one by own and dig into each one asking things like; Is there something you can do about this right now? If so, what? This practice helps me visualize the stress and contextualize it. When I do this, I often find that most of the stress and overwhelm is due to circumstances I can’t control and it allows me to let go of it.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://emdashcontentstudio.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sarahmloughry/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahloughry/
Image Credits
Lauren Webster
