The Type A+ Podcast Episode 44 - On Taking On Invisible Work
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Episode Description:
On this week's episode, Beth chats with Marissa Taffer, PMP, longtime friend and project management professional, about how being type A can allow you to take on Invisible work (and do it to a high level of perfection) that can lead to burnout, job scope creep or your work being undervalued.
Plus, Marissa shares her tips for Type A+ Gluten Free baking and the ways her winding career path led her to find success--and satisfaction--in freelancing.
About Marissa
Marissa Taffer, PMP, CSM, is the founder and president of M. Taffer Consulting. In her practice, she provides project management consulting and fractional project management to digital agencies and marketing teams. She is also a content creator specializing in long-form blog posts. Her byline can be found in the blogs of Ollie, Qwilr, MarketerHire, and thedigitalprojectmanager.com.
Links mentioned in the episode:
PODCAST:
The Type A Plus Podcast Instagram
HOST:
Beth Lawrence & Company Instagram
Beth and other Type A+ Guests will be back each week, delivering bite-sized tips on how to optimize your work and life.
GUEST:
Marissa Taffer Website
Marissa Taffer LinkedIn
Episode Transcript can be found below:
Beth Lawrence: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the type a plus podcast. I'm your host Beth Lawrence. And today I'm so excited to have my Dear friend and freelance fellow freelancer, Marissa Taffer here. And Marissa is going to chat about a lot of different things, but we're going to focus on our freelancing careers today. And we'll dive into the personal a little bit, but really excited to talk to you about what it's like being a freelancer, how you started out on your journey and the different tips that you've picked up along the way that you can share with our audience. So Marissa, we're so glad to have you with us today. Please introduce yourself to the listeners and tell a little bit about what you do.
Marissa Taffer: Sure. I'm so excited to be here. As Beth said, I'm Marissa Taffer. I am a freelance project manager and content creator.
Marissa Taffer: Now, that means that I go into marketing teams, marketing departments, digital agencies, and help them with either project management process. Or actually managing projects if they have somebody that's out on leave they have some overflow business where Maybe they don't need another full time project manager, but do need some extra support, on a temporary basis , and then on the content side of my business, I mostly do long form blog posts for B2B or direct to consumer companies.
Marissa Taffer: So I've written about everything from office coffee programs to sales and proposal software and even dog food. Before freelancing, it was a very winding career path also. So I've worked in sales and sales enablement. I've done some event management work and actually sold event sponsorships for a couple of years.
Marissa Taffer: And what else? Uh, some digital marketing. It's been well rounded and the beauty of something like that is you bring it to all of your clients.
Marissa Taffer: So all of that past experience has somehow found its way into some of the work that I'm currently doing, which is really neat.
Beth Lawrence: I think you also can bring empathy to the teams for your other clients because you've served so many different roles, you undoubtedly will work with sales, sales enablement, as a project manager and work with different teams.
Beth Lawrence: So to be able to come to into conversations with an understanding of what they do and what they have on their plate, I think is really an amazing way to start. A relationship with a client. And I think that's probably why you've had so much success. And I love that you mentioned that you used to sell event sponsorships, because that is how we met.
Beth Lawrence: And gosh, the events world and the project management world are so Aligned in so many different ways. But 1 of the things that we have talked about is we're both very, very type a plus. And I think when we met each other, that was one of the first things that we talked about and bonded on is like, why is everyone not like us? I don't understand this. So tell the listeners and me, what is something that you're super type a plus about in your personal life and then also in your business?
Marissa Taffer: Okay, let's start with personal just because I feel like this one's a little bit more fun.
Beth Lawrence: All right, great. Let's do it.
Marissa Taffer: Super type A about baking. So I found out when I was in my, I was actually in my late 20s when I found out I couldn't eat gluten anymore. And I was devastated. You know, I knew that if I stopped eating it, I would feel better.
Marissa Taffer: But I felt like baking and cooking was such a central part of my identity. I was like, how am I going to? Do this and back then the Gluten free world was not what it is today so I had to relearn from the ground up how to bake with different flours .
Beth Lawrence: Oh, my goodness. Marissa, you are a trailblazer that I remember talking to you about that. And It was, you were so few and far between places that you could find things, let alone recipes. So you have to be super type A about baking, especially when it comes to cross contamination.
Beth Lawrence: What's your favorite gluten free thing that you've baked? Because I'm gluten free, so now I am salivating and very excited.
Marissa Taffer: Recently, actually, a newer recipe for a gluten free, chocolate, orange Madeline that I actually, I'm going to tell your listeners my secret because it's not really that big of a secret, but what I ended up doing is they were supposed to be dipped or drizzled in chocolate before you serve them.
Marissa Taffer: So chocolate, some orange zest, whatever. I actually. Just about halved the amount of chocolate that I used and swapped the other portion out for these Nestle Espresso chips, so they kind of taste like a chocolate covered espresso, but like without that gritty texture and they melt nice. Even all my gluten eating friends were devouring them. So I knew I was onto something.
Beth Lawrence: Wow. That sounds incredible. What the listeners did not see is my jaw dropped because I, I love espresso and chocolate together. So, I am down to gluten free bake off anytime, and you will probably win. But, what is something you're super type A about in your business? Besides everything, since you're a project manager.
Marissa Taffer: I was chuckling when you asked, but I'm a project manager, it's literally my job to be type A.
Marissa Taffer: Probably the thing that I'm the most Type A about is making sure that whatever we're doing is really in support of The project and the clients. People think sometimes we're just the hired guns and we come in, we do our work, we collect our little paychecks, and we leave. But, I mean, it's not just about the money.
Marissa Taffer: It's about making sure that the project is done. Right. It's done well. And it's done in a way that people feel good. I think especially on the agency side, we hear and see a lot about agency burnout, which again is probably another really good overlap with the events world. People are expected, especially now with the economy, they do more with less. People have been laid off. Teams are smaller. We're much more strategic about who we're bringing into the organization or the team, which can be great if you're a freelancer, if you're augmenting in a temporary area.
Marissa Taffer: But coming in as that project manager and being the head of a project, making sure that my team has what they need. My team isn't burning out. They're feeling good about the work that they're doing. And because I'm so type A about it, I have no problem advocating for that or going to agency leadership if I have to and saying, listen, you are at risk of burning your people out.
Marissa Taffer: This project was under build. This project was underscoped. What can we do to fix this so that we're still delighting our client and we're not doing it at the detriment of the team?
Beth Lawrence: That is a huge thing to bring to a team as a freelancer, because like you said, a lot of people expect, and I'm sure that they expect it because they've had experiences like this, that your freelancer is going to come in. There's going to be a list of things to do. They're going to do it. They're going to collect the money and they're going to go. They're not going to really necessarily want to be an integral part of the team or be able to think holistically and strategically. And I really love that you bring that to the team.
Marissa Taffer: Yeah, I think, I think it's just critical and a lot of my marketing teams do trade shows.
Marissa Taffer: So one of the things that we do when we're setting things up and putting in, project dependencies, so that the tasks that rely on each other. So for example, things like you, if you're printing collateral, I'm just gonna use that as an example. If you're actually printing collateral for your trade show booth, Does it matter if you push that print deadline back a day or two if it's a couple weeks before the show?
Marissa Taffer: Probably not. But if everything's depending on each other and you have it set up in your project management tool that way, you accidentally shove everything back two days and now all of a sudden your trade show dates are in your project management system. Yeah. Two days later than it is.
Marissa Taffer: You can't roll up to the show two days late. Like you just.
Beth Lawrence: Exactly.
Marissa Taffer: Can't do that.
Beth Lawrence: Right. And to your point, if you're getting printed items, the person that's designing it may have slated time in their calendar, like, okay, if it's due this day, I'm going to receive the information on this day and I'll take these two days to create it.
Beth Lawrence: Well, if you push it back two days, now you're bumping up against that person's other workload that they have, which is always the balance, which is why, why we come in.
Marissa Taffer: Exactly. And it's one of those things that, that what you just touched on is important, you don't always realize how your work is impacting other folks until you come up to that 10, 000 foot level.
Beth Lawrence: Yes. And I guess to get to the crux of the episode, one of the things that we were talking about of the crossover, especially being Type A, taking on extra work or what you called invisible work is something that I think really plagues us.
Beth Lawrence: And I would love to talk about that. Define for the listeners, what do you mean when you say that? And how does that show up in the workplace?
Marissa Taffer: When I was researching this topic for a talk with ladies get paid, one of the things that I learned was that there's a, I believe it's a Harvard Business Review article that says women are 40% more likely to get asked to volunteer for these types of things.
Beth Lawrence: Oh my God.
Marissa Taffer: Yeah.
Beth Lawrence: Wait, wait a minute. 40%. More likely to what?
Marissa Taffer: To get asked to volunteer.
Beth Lawrence: That's incredible.
Marissa Taffer: To give some examples and put something around this is it could be that as a woman you are the one who 99% of the time gets asked to take notes in a meeting. Are those the things that are going to get you promoted? No. Facilitating the meeting, taking the lead, like those are the things that you're trying to rack up and you can't do that as much if you're being asked to take on the note taking or earlier in my career when I was in a full time role, it was always the employee engagement stuff.
Marissa Taffer: So it was really important to the company, but it was never the thing that was going to get me promoted. And it was a huge body of my work.
Beth Lawrence: Yeah. Yeah. That's, that is an incredible observation. do you think it shows up in your freelance workplace at all?
Beth Lawrence: I guess is my first question and my second question is do you think being a type a person? Affects the amount of invisible work that you take on?
Marissa Taffer: So to your first question, yes and no when we talk about pricing our services I'm perfectly happy to do it, but you're going to pay that hourly rate for it. I think clients think a little bit different about it when you're talking about that kind of budget. I've had clients say, Hey, can we have you do the strategy and then we'll do the implementation and you'll check it so that we're not having you spend hours building out our projects.
Marissa Taffer: Sure, it's a, it's a great way to get the value of a senior consultant without having to Pay for a full implementation. So it's a do it with me instead of do it for me mentality Which I think also works out great. If we use value based pricing, sometimes as a consultant the temptation there is to be like, I've asked for this huge block of money, so I need to deliver, deliver, deliver, deliver, which is great.
Marissa Taffer: But, what we don't want to see happen is we try to over deliver to the point where now I'm averaging it out and instead of my normal consulting rate, I'm barely making minimum wage, and That is something that can happen, I think, especially when you're newer to freelancing.
Beth Lawrence: Well, I was gonna say, you're literally talking to first year in business, Beth, right now because I did that so much because I did the value based pricing. I think As a type a person, I wanted to over deliver for my clients.
Beth Lawrence: I was like, well, I told them I was going to give them, their high level event marketing plan, but what if I just included some experiential stuff in there? That would be really cool. And then maybe they will respect me enough to book me for this next engagement. And I feel like I think invisible work can be something that we do to ourselves as type a people for sure.
Beth Lawrence: Did that happen to you in your first year or was that just me? Because I feel like it took me probably at least four years to understand truly the boundaries that you need to set consistently in order to not take on that invisible work.
Marissa Taffer: I think all of us, at least every freelancer I've ever talked to, has a lot of that discovery in the first year of some of those pitfalls. Maybe it's not quite, project management in itself sometimes feels like invisible work. It's something that occasionally will get handed to an administrative professional or somebody who has those strong organizational skills is probably really type A.
Marissa Taffer: But they've not had the formal training. It tells you how companies and organizations, even ones that are as phenomenal and well respected as this agency are, value the discipline. And that's something that I've battled with as a freelancer almost five years.
Beth Lawrence: Thank you so much for sharing that first of all, because I feel like sometimes when I look at job postings or when I'm in negotiations and people put in their budgets, I'm like, I've been in the hospitality industry my whole life, like 20 plus years.
Beth Lawrence: I know events inside and out from every person's perspective. I know what every person on the floor should be doing at any moment. That's what you're paying for. You cannot equate that with handing it to someone else on a team who may have some organizational skills. But I think that that happens a lot.
Beth Lawrence: I think that sometimes people think, well, if you're a type a person, you're automatically a great project manager, or you're automatically a great event planner, but I feel like there's a, there's a similarity in our industries too. And in, in the ebbs and flows of when people value what we do and when they don't.
Marissa Taffer: I'll say this. For, for any freelancer that's listening is talk to your people, like, don't make a decision in a vacuum because I was about to.
Beth Lawrence: Yes.
Marissa Taffer: Women tend to raise their hand when they have 100% of the qualifications and men go, you know, 40%. There, there was a big thing in the job description that I knew I didn't have. And another project manager I know well, I guess had been working with them to source somebody and had reached out. so I send over everything. She comes back and goes, Yeah, we had budgeted a rate that was about two thirds of what you're asking for, like, would that be okay? I don't know her I don't know anything about the organization The only thing I do know is that this role has been open for a bit And I know they've talked to quite a number of people So i'm going well if all of these other people have not been a fit for whatever reason or they've told you No, i'm gonna go with my gut.
Beth Lawrence: Yeah. And the thing with what we sell is that it's not a physical thing, right? We're not selling phones. We don't have endless supplies of phones. We can theoretically make, we have our time and expertise. So we have to find the right combination of those things to create the right pricing for the market at the time.
Beth Lawrence: And the thing with freelancing is every time you say yes to something, you're effectively closing your calendar to another opportunity. And we've I've been there where I've said yes to an opportunity that I knew maybe wasn't the right fit for me, but I was like, I like this client. I need the money, whatever it was.
Beth Lawrence: And then two weeks later, a perfect opportunity with the right budget fell into my lap and I had to refer it. It's funny because as type a people, we're taking a huge risk by being freelancers because you can't control us so much of it. How do you not stress about that detail of freelancing, that uncertainty of volume of work in any given time?
Marissa Taffer: Oh, that's a really good question, and I think that the answer for me, at least, You know, as, as I've explained it to folks who are considering making the leap is pay yourself first. So like before you put money in the lifestyle bucket, you put money in the, I used to call it the I call it the sky is falling bucket. Like you said, you give up a lot of that control. And the only things you can do is, A, make sure you are financially secure, so when things are good, you are putting that money away, so that one client is not going to make or break you. It just, it takes some of that pressure off.
Marissa Taffer: Once that pool of money feels like it's a number that I feel comfortable with, then, you know, it's, It's lifestyle money and whatever that thing is that feels good for you, making sure that you are aligning your budget.
Marissa Taffer: To those things because to me that's really the point of being a freelancer . Create the kind of life that you want to create that balance that you're looking for.
Marissa Taffer: Even when I launched the business I actually had a conversation with my dad and he was like for you to keep doing this and not decide to go back to working for somebody else.
Marissa Taffer: What does it have to look like? And I said, I would like the business to look like this number of clients who each pay me about between this number and this number. That number's going to be different for everybody, which is part of the reason I'm not using real numbers. But, that's the North Star for me.
Beth Lawrence: Yeah, totally. I want to close with, What advice would you give to listeners that are finding themselves at their nine to five, work piling in, and they're just taking it on and trying to do the best that they can? What advice would you give to someone that needs to have a conversation?
Marissa Taffer: Yeah, I think it's a couple of things. I think the first thing is, are there things that you can easily just delegate that nobody's going to make a big stink about? So whether it's taking the notes as a really good example, if you're walking into a big group meeting. Is there somebody in the room that you trust that you could ask? Or another one that I'm actually just gonna steal from an agency I worked with last summer because I thought it was phenomenal. Every week we had a meeting of all of the project managers, including the contract PMs, to talk about workloads and shifting things around and how are the teams doing, does anybody need anything?
Marissa Taffer: In those meetings, We automatically just had a rotation system, so every single person in that meeting was taking notes at one time or another, and I thought that was just a really nice, really fair, and of course it was a group of PMs that come up with this,
Marissa Taffer: but,
Beth Lawrence: No, that's a great idea. That's a great, fair way to do it, and that way no one is feeling like they're, they are the sole person responsible for taking on this extra work.
Marissa Taffer: Yeah, so let's say you can't do that and maybe, just because both of us are type A and we've both been in this situation at some point, you are the youngest, most junior person in the room and maybe you don't feel comfortable asking your director or VP to be taking notes, that is totally understandable.
Marissa Taffer: You know, maybe it's a conversation with a boss or a mentor of, hey, these are the goals that I have, here's some of the work that I'm doing, and here's some of the things that I really, Want to be doing or maybe I need your counsel and your advice to understand What are the things that I should be focusing on? So that I can get to that next level in my career and starting to have those conversations And the other thing that I hear sometimes when we talk about doing that is somebody goes well, what if my boss Brushes this off. What if my boss doesn't give me anything concrete? What it what if I can't get that information? Okay, well, you just got some information. If that's what's happening to you, I'd also Encourage you to look outside your organization to look for a mentor or somebody who can guide you And that person should probably be somebody who's in your industry who's maybe been in your in the role you're in Or even better, somebody who has the role that you're aspiring to. And then the final piece of advice that I have, if you are thinking about that transition, because you're taking on invisible work, you're feeling stuck, you're not growing. Is just to start network, make sure you're not working your butt off. Make sure you're talking to people regularly.
Beth Lawrence: I feel like you gave advice from a perspective of many different milestones in your career because it can happen all the time, right? It really depends on the situation: whether you're at a new job, Whether you have a new client, it can creep in so learning to have those conversations early on in your career especially is super important and it'll save you a lot of headache and a lot of Invisible work over a period of time. Marissa last thing. First of all, thank you so much for being here. I would love for the listeners to be able to get in touch with you.
Marissa Taffer: My website is probably the easiest. It's mtafferconsulting. com. I have a contact form on there, so fill it out and I will get back to you as soon as I can. I'm working on that boundary. Or LinkedIn is another great way to connect with me, if you just want to stay in the network, and learn a little bit about what's going on at mtafferconsulting, or ask some questions. That is another great way to stay in touch.
Beth Lawrence: Marissa shares a lot of great tips on LinkedIn and as also as you ask for a lot of great feedback, which I think is really cool. So definitely connect with Marissa. Thank you so much again for joining us and type a plus listeners.. We will be back next week with another episode. Take care.