About this time last year, my friend Amy Leibrock reached out to me with an idea. We’d both been struggling with motivation to promote our freelance businesses. She wondered if having an accountability partner for self-promotion would help us show up for our businesses, just like having a friend go to yoga with helps ensure that you show up. Thus began a year-long partnership we called Freelance Fuel Fridays. Here are some things we learned about how to get the most out of an accountability partnership. 

Amy and I have similar challenges and different skills. We are both experienced freelancers with stable workloads who want to diversify and grow our client bases. Amy is a freelance writer and I’m a designer, so I can ask her for writing help, and she can ask me for design help.

We’re continuing to define this, but the biggest wins have been simply setting aside time for marketing and having someone to bounce ideas off of. 

For us, a Zoom meeting every other Friday morning seems to work. It’s loose enough that it doesn’t impact my schedule much and frequent enough that I can feel like I get a little accomplished each month. We’ve pushed meetings out a week now and then because paying work and personal lives have to come first. 

We have an automatic email that goes out the day before our meeting to remind us to check in and make sure the time works. We use a shared Google Doc to capture agendas, ideas, notes, etc. 

Sometimes we show up for our meeting frazzled and tired and having made little progress on our marketing goals since our last meeting. That’s okay! We sign off and use the meeting time to work on tasks. Then we check back in at the end to follow up. 

Because otherwise, what’s the point? We try to ask and answer the following questions with as much transparency as possible. Did you accomplish your task(s) since the last meeting? What do you want to accomplish for the next meeting? Is there anything I can do to help? 

Just like any long-term goal, it’s more about continuing to show up and making small steady progress. I for one, have had my busiest year since 2020. 

Thank you Amy, for your ideas, time and support. I’m looking forward to another year of Freelance Fuel Fridays! 

If you have any ideas for making the most of an accountability partnership, we’d love to hear them.