The E-Myth Revisited – by Michael Gerber.
Liz at Adobe Max – Design conference where Liz has spoken.
Daniel Priestley Survive The AI Era.
Building Your Brand podcast – Liz's podcast.
Liz Mosley never planned on working for herself, but 18 years, a stationery side hustle, and two kids later, she's built an independent branding studio and a podcast that has become one of her most valuable business assets.
In this episode, Ian Paget sits down with Liz to explore the moment she stopped treating her business like a hobby, why podcasting became her biggest confidence boost, and how showing up consistently, mistakes and all, builds trust in a way AI never will.
They also dive into Liz's "100 Rejections" challenge, a personal game she created to stop fearing the word "no." It led to partnerships with Adobe and Flodesk, as well as a joint talk at Adobe Max with a former guest of the Logo Geek Podcast.
If you've ever felt stuck working in your business instead of on it, this episode is for you.
Ian Paget: So today I'm joined by Liz Mosley. She runs her own independent studio at LizMosley.net and also hosts a podcast, Building Your Brand. You've been in the game for a long time, close to 18 years. I found it really interesting that when you started out, you didn't see yourself being freelance or working independently. Why didn't you picture yourself working freelance?
Liz Mosley: I'm not really sure what the reason was. At university there were all these agencies people talked about, it was almost a very set idea of how people imagined their careers going, and I got swept along by that. I couldn't really imagine working for myself. I actually think it worked out for the best, because I learned so much working for other people that when I did go self employed, it was a much less steep learning curve. I'd already learned a lot of the lessons before I even started.
Ian Paget: So today I'm joined by Liz Mosley. She runs her own independent studio at LizMosley.net and also hosts a podcast, Building Your Brand. You've been in the game for a long time, close to 18 years. I found it really interesting that when you started out, you didn't see yourself being freelance or working independently. Why didn't you picture yourself working freelance?
Liz Mosley: I'm not really sure what the reason was. At university there were all these agencies people talked about, it was almost a very set idea of how people imagined their careers going, and I got swept along by that. I couldn't really imagine working for myself. I actually think it worked out for the best, because I learned so much working for other people that when I did go self employed, it was a much less steep learning curve. I'd already learned a lot of the lessons before I even started.
I've always been a classic extrovert, so the idea of being part of a team and working with other designers was really appealing, especially early on when I was green and wanted to learn from others. It was never on my list of things to do. A lot of people in my year at university wanted to work for someone else, but had that vision of maybe opening their own studio one day. For me it came about accidentally rather than intentionally, which, I've realised, is how a lot of things happen in my career.
Ian: I found that very relatable. For me it was upbringing: you go out, get a job, work your way up. When I started out I wanted to work for a design studio too, and life just showed me a different way.
Ian: You've since niched down into branding, and you call yourself the "friendly designer BFF," a really cool positioning. Walk me through what happened between wanting to work your way up in a studio and where you are now.
Liz: Ultimately, the big catalyst was having kids. That changed everything. Before that I'd had a taste of it. I moved from a small agency to working in house, which I actually loved because I was given a lot of autonomy. It was almost like running my own little studio: multiple projects, start to finish, which was very different from an agency where different people come in at different stages.
Alongside that job, I started a side project just for fun, designing stationery, which I sold through a little online shop and at craft markets around London. It never became a huge business, but it revealed who I wanted my target audience to be later on. People started asking me to do branding projects, friends of friends, so I dropped to four days a week to experiment with freelancing. All of this was just before I got pregnant with my first child.
I had a kid, went on maternity leave, and by the end of it I couldn't imagine going back. I wanted the flexibility, and I knew I wanted another child, so I figured self employment could scale up and down with our family's needs. That was the real catalyst for going all in.
Ian: Your story is a great example of laying foundations unintentionally: working for a company, seeing how sales and marketing work, then testing things yourself through side projects. If anyone reading is just starting out, I'd say get a studio job first, for exactly the reasons you've described. I see a lot of designers straight out of university try to go freelance immediately, and they really struggle with the business side, getting clients, managing difficult clients, because they haven't built those foundations. If you're at that stage yourself, my Ultimate Guide to Logo Design covers a lot of what those foundations should look like.
Something I always struggled with was getting videos of my daughter's milestones while at work, "she stood up today," and wanting to be there. That pushed me to eventually go full time.
Ian: You said yourself that early on you treated it a bit like a hobby. What shifted you from hobbyist to running a serious branding business?
Liz: I still go generic with "graphic designer," though branding is my specialism. I probably should come up with something better. During my two maternity leaves I was doing what I could in the gaps, nap times, nursery hours, running both the stationery shop and freelance branding projects. After my second child was born, I realised I had to pick one. I closed the stationery shop and went all in on the service side of the business, which was absolutely the right call.
That decision is when it stopped feeling like a hobby. I also became far more ambitious than I'd ever been in my job, where there wasn't really anywhere to progress. Suddenly there was no ceiling. I wanted to build something sustainable that could support my family, especially once my husband also went self employed and needed a bit of a buffer. I enrolled on a marketing course, because self promotion had never really been part of my in house roles, and that investment in training is what flipped things from "hobby" to "this is my full time income."
Ian: As soon as you mentioned the wholesale side of the stationery business, that's a completely different way of thinking, mass production versus just making things look nice. Have you read The E Myth Revisited?
Liz: I have a copy but haven't read it yet, though I've heard great things.
Ian: The gist is that people who are great at the craft assume they can run a business doing that craft, burn out, and the business fails, because they're working in the business, not on it. It sounds like your shift was exactly that: from day to day design work to the bigger picture strategy.
Liz: Working for myself has been like full time therapy: you have to come to terms with who you are, your strengths and weaknesses. One thing that's served me well is that I genuinely love doing lots of different things, design, content, podcasting, so marketing my business has never felt like a chore. It's felt like an opportunity to experiment.
Ian: I really struggled when I first went self employed. I used to think I was a hard worker as an employee, up at six, working all day, barely any breaks, but I realised a lot of that "busyness" wasn't actually productive; it just felt useful. When you're self employed, you can't get away with spending a whole day on one social post the way you might in a job. You have to change your mindset and confront how much time you used to waste without realising it.
Ian: Your podcast is five years old now. Did you face any barriers getting into it?
Liz: My barrier was petty. Everyone was starting a podcast in 2020, and if everyone's doing something, I don't want to. Ironically it was usually something I'd have loved anyway. A friend who was a podcast editor egged me on, and we did a skill swap where she edited my first batch of episodes, which made it feel low risk. I loved it immediately, and one reason I've kept going for five years is that it's genuinely fun for me rather than a chore, and that compounding effort over time has made it a core part of my business.
Ian: Was starting the podcast a conscious business decision, or did it just feel like something you should be doing?
Liz: So the theme that I've realised through my whole working for myself, probably my whole career, is that I don't really do anything particularly strategically. It's very much motivated by what I think I'll enjoy and what I think will be fun for me, and then the strategy comes into place later on. So I will start the thing from a place of fun, from a place of play and experimentation, and then when I realise I like it, I'm like, okay, this could actually really benefit my business, and then I'll get a bit more strategic about it afterwards.
When I started the podcast, I was aware it was a marketing tool, but the bigger driver was wanting to be visible as an older woman in the design industry, since I rarely saw that represented when I was starting out. I interview a real mix of people, but there's a deliberate skew toward women, who've typically been less visible in design. I didn't consciously plan that at the start, but I can see the strategy and the bigger goal behind it now.
Liz: A big part of podcasting success is simply continuing. Most people don't get past 20 episodes, so if you do, you're already in a small percentage of shows worldwide. I don't have to be the biggest or the best; I just have to keep going and keep improving. It's been a genuine slow burn. I saw the personal benefits long before I saw any business results.
Liz: Personally, it's been a huge confidence boost. My confidence was at an all time low after having kids, partly from the identity shift that comes with becoming a parent. Podcasting gave me a "bank of evidence": conversations with people I respected, good feedback from listeners, brands wanting to sponsor the show. It's also sharpened my ability to articulate ideas and listen while thinking of a follow up question at the same time, a skill I never thought I had.
Ian: Everything you're describing is so relatable. I used to stutter badly and feel physically sick before recording. The good thing about podcasting is it's pre recorded, so mistakes don't matter, and I've found nobody really cares if you stumble. It's helped me get comfortable with public speaking generally, including live stage work.
Liz: It's very humbling too. You can do something career defining, like speaking at Adobe Max, and come home to de nitting your kids' hair the next day. It's not always glamorous, but it gives balance I'm grateful for.
Liz: I wanted to do more public speaking, and the podcast gave me a bank of evidence that I can speak. I've also started thinking of myself more as a media company. I recently found out I could apply for press accreditation at design conferences as a podcaster, which was a mindset shift in itself.
Quantifying clients from the podcast has always been hard, because people rarely say it's only the podcast. But recently a couple of clients have said outright, "we heard you talking about branding on your podcast and liked your philosophy," which has been really encouraging, though it's taken five years for that to start happening consistently.
From a business perspective, the podcast has led to brand collaborations, speaking opportunities, and made it an easier "yes" when I pitch to be a guest on other people's shows, because I can show proof I'll be a good guest.
Ian: As a podcast host myself, it is daunting to bring on a guest with no interview experience. Can they sustain a conversation? I think there's also a lot of indirect value people don't notice. Most of my work comes from people searching online, and you need that know, like and trust factor. Your website has photos of you, your personality comes through in the writing, and there are videos of you talking, on your own show and as a guest elsewhere. That plays a much bigger role than people realise.
Liz: Everything really does link back to the podcast now. A long term relationship with Adobe started from them getting in touch about sponsoring the show. I don't have huge download numbers, and I still get told no all the time, but you don't have to be the biggest to make podcasting a genuinely successful, integral part of your business.
Ian: Being visible, podcast, video, social, has always mattered, but I think it matters even more now because of AI's growing impact on our industry this year.
Liz: I watched a video by Daniel Priestley recently about this. He said the people who'll do well in the current AI climate are the ones who've already built trust, because when everything online feels uncertain, people cling to those they already trust. That felt encouraging, because it validates years of investment that didn't always show immediate results.
Not being perfect matters too. I'm a terrible speller, and now I think that might become part of my "proof" that content wasn't written by AI. I don't run things through AI or heavily edit for perfection; a friend proofreads for me, but mistakes still slip through. In the past, professionalism meant slick and glossy. Now the focus is on being honest, relatable and showing you're a real person.
Ian: Since having my daughter, I've found people really relate to honesty. When I wrote about my mum passing away, a client reached out because she could relate. Leaning into being "socially awkward" or geeky has actually made me more memorable.
Liz: I love that the internet means there's something for everybody. I don't have to be the right fit for everyone, just for some people. Showing up authentically draws in the right ones. That's the whole point of branding too: put off the people who aren't the right fit, and draw in the ones who are, by giving a realistic view of what it's like to work with you.
Ian: You've talked about gamifying challenges, including one where you set a goal to be rejected a certain number of times in a year. Can you share more about that?
Liz: Early in the podcast, I invited a well known designer to be a guest, and he essentially said, "come back when the show is bigger." I felt embarrassed, and realised I'd stopped pitching people of similar profile out of fear of that feeling again. A friend had done something similar and called it the "no thank you challenge." I set myself a goal of 100 rejections in six months, and completely failed, because people kept saying yes.
It immediately transformed my mindset by creating a win win: either they say yes (great) or no (progress toward the goal). I still haven't hit 50 rejections, four years on, because I keep getting more yeses than expected.
Ian: What's the biggest thing that's come out of trying to get rejected?
Liz: Doing a talk with that same designer about rejection at Adobe Max this year. I pitched the idea, asked him to join me, and he agreed. It's also led to sponsorships I wanted, including Flodesk, who reached out to me about becoming a top affiliate right around when I started the challenge. I asked them to sponsor the podcast and they said yes immediately. I'm at roughly 50/50 yes to no now, but rejections don't feel like a big deal anymore. Instead of shutting down, I see them as "that wasn't the thing, what's next?"
Ian: You're going for things you might never have considered, because you don't care about the outcome. It's win win either way.
Liz: Exactly. I even made myself a sticker chart. I'd recommend anyone try a smaller version of this challenge, even ten rejections, because it reframes everything almost immediately.
Liz: Podcasting is a great way to test this. I've pitched people I was convinced would say no. I once asked illustrator Lisa Congdon to be a guest, fully expecting a no, and she said yes. She told me people rarely ask her to be on podcasts. Often we reject on someone's behalf in our heads, assuming they're too busy, when the truth is usually much less dramatic, a scheduling clash, not a reflection of their worth.
Ian: I think everyone tells themselves these worst case stories, because we're all human, however confident people appear on the surface. I've had this myself pitching guests like Tom Geismar and Aaron Draplin for the Logo Geek Podcast; you assume they'll say no, and often they don't.
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