Anna Burgess Yang on Business Resilience and Smart Automation

Nigel Rawlins: Anna, welcome back to the Wisepreneurs podcast. We last spoke on episode 65, that was back in November. How are you?

Anna Burgess Yang: Yeah, I am, I'm doing well, but quite a bit different from the last time we spoke because I learned in May of this year that I had a brain tumor. Thankfully, it was benign, and I live in a suburb of Chicago, so I had. Access to excellent medical care. but that really kind of threw my summer, for a loop as I had, brain surgery to remove it in July.

So I'm now two months beyond that and just started working again a few weeks ago.

Nigel Rawlins: One of the issues for anybody working for themselves is this issue of their health and the precariousness of their health, but not just health there and many, many other issues that can affect them. So how do you look at , working for yourself now with what you now know?

Anna Burgess Yang: That, you know, when I first started working for myself, which was almost about three years ago now, that was always a fear and not necessarily a like, brain tumor. But what happens if, I can't work? Maybe I just get a really bad flu and you know, I'm, I'm out for a week or something like that. Early in my career, I worked in banking and so I've always kind of been financially minded.

So I immediately, when I started working for myself, I started squirreling away money. Like anytime I had a really good month with my client work, I would just shove money in a savings account. And turns out I needed that, because I ended up not working for a full two months.

I was very lucky and had minimal side effects from my surgery. The neurosurgeon was upfront that he wasn't exactly sure what the outcome could be and it could have been longer, that I couldn't work. So I'm lucky in that regard, that I was at least financially prepared.

There were a lot of other logistical things I had to figure out, but at least that part I didn't have to stress about.

Nigel Rawlins: So that is a good suggestion. So you're suggesting that you know if you are going to work for yourself, don't just spend all the money.

Anna Burgess Yang: Yes, put some of it aside for a rainy

Nigel Rawlins: did you find that your family was supportive?

Anna Burgess Yang: Yes. and also a lot of friends that I have in the area, my parents, I'm in the United States, big country. My parents came, from another state and they stayed with us for, five or six weeks, from surgery and helped take care of my kids. I had people drop off meals. I had a friend mowed my lawn.

So a lot of people, asked how they could help and I had to say, yes, we need help and here's something tangible that you could do that would make our lives a little easier, because I was in the hospital for two weeks, and then when I got home I could not do very much. So that was great.

Nigel Rawlins: Isn't that wonderful? And what about with your work? Did you have people helping you just cope with some of that? Because it would be hard to stop for a couple of months.

Anna Burgess Yang: It was, so client work I pretty much had to stop because I do all of that myself. And that's what clients are paying me for is, I'm a writer in FinTech, which is a very niche field. And so I I basically had to tell my clients, I can't work. I would love to keep working with you if you're willing to wait for me.

If you can't and you need to hire somebody else. I understand. but a lot of other things I do, I was able to ask for help. I have a newsletter, and so people made guest contributions so that I didn't have to try to keep writing or, and so I pre-scheduled a lot of that. People contribute guest posts my blog and scheduled those to go out my substack.

And that was incredibly helpful and it was great for those people as well, because then I gave them a shout out and link back to their website. I did a ton of pre-writing and pre-planning knowing that it could be, you know, eight to 12 weeks before I could work again. And so I was really grateful for everyone who stepped forward and said, yep, I'm willing to help you.

Nigel Rawlins: You know what's amazing about that is if people listen to our previous episode, how super organized you are, you get up early in the morning and you have three children.

Anna Burgess Yang: Yep.

Nigel Rawlins: So for you to add that into it, to be an incredible drain on your energy.

Anna Burgess Yang: Yeah, from the time I was diagnosed until surgery, I had about six weeks. I think that was my way of not focusing too much on a surgery that had a very unpredictable outcome, was to kind of bury myself in preparing. I used Trello for project management, so everybody that said, yes, I'll help you.

I, created lists and things so I could follow up with people, make sure what they said they would get over to me, drafts and things like that. Then I stopped doing client work about three weeks before surgery so that I wasn't running right up to the end. I mean, by that point I was kind of a mess and very stressed.

Didn't feel I could do my best work anyway. So at that point I was working on getting all this stuff scheduled, getting social media posts scheduled to go out so that my, LinkedIn profile and such would remain active even when I was not active. But yes, that it required a lot of kind of organization to make sure that all those things could come together by my July surgery date.

Nigel Rawlins: I don't think people realize how organized you are, but I think they can hear. One of the things I like to talk about is the extended mind. Which, you know, building other tools and things that we can use to help our cognitive ability. So, during your recovery, it was pretty obvious to you that your cognitive ability was reduced.

What automated systems prove most valuable to you?

Anna Burgess Yang: I use, Zapier, for automation. I've used it for many years. During recovery, I wanted to still communicate with people about how I was doing, that was really important to me. Connected to a lot of people I've never met in real life like you, a lot of people said, how are we gonna get updates from you?

How are we gonna know how the surgery went? So I wanted to keep publishing in my blog. So I actually used a dictation tool, that uses ai. And so I would just dictate and it would get a transcript, and then automation picked that up and sent it to an editor who graciously agreed to help me.

Check to make sure it sounded okay that I didn't sound like I was on too many pain meds or anything like that. Another automation piece would kick off and get that over to my virtual assistant, who then loaded it onto my website and got it published so it would go out that way.

So all I had to do was dictate into my phone and then this with help of two people and a bunch of automation, got my words out

into the world.

Nigel Rawlins: It just sounds like waving a magic wand. I mean, who would've thought, you know, 20 years ago that you could do that? Connect with so many people and, but this is one of the most amazing things that we, we need to realize nobody works on their own anymore, when you're doing intelligent work like that, you have a team around you, but you've also got tools like Zapier.

One of the problems we have in Australia is the Australian dollar compared to the US dollar, so Zapier is incredibly expensive here. It's like about three or $400 a year I think, or more. I forget, or it might, might be more

than that. So I think the American dollar is much easier to use Zapier.

So do you find it easy to set up Zapier? We call 'em Zaps to do these things.

Anna Burgess Yang: yeah,

I do at this point. but at this point I've been using it, I think. I'm gonna guess maybe 10 years. I even used it back when I worked at a corporate job. But I'm a lot better at it now than I was. A lot of the things were just trial and error and I'm like, I want it to do this thing, so I'm just gonna try to poke at it and figure out until I could get it to do that thing. I've learned a lot of tricks to make it better or, you know, if it doesn't quite do what I want, I can kind of finagle it a little bit and figure that out. But it is intimidating. I think there is a learning curve to it, especially if you've never used it before and you kind of don't even know where to start.

It is an expensive tool. I think it's the most expensive tool I pay for even in US dollars, but it saves me so much time that

it's worth it.

Nigel Rawlins: Yeah, I, and I think that's the way to look at it, is if you had to pay for somebody to do all these things or to spend the time to do all those things, you know, it can actually work out a lot cheaper. I've been trying make.com, which is an alternative.

Anna Burgess Yang: Yeah

Nigel Rawlins: it is a lot cheaper for Australians and I set one up the other day and believe it or not, Gemini sort of helped. We couldn't quite get it right even though we were using Gemini as the AI engine to process newsletters. 'cause I've I've got a very bad habit of subscribing to a million newsletters and then they come in and they clog up my email system.

So I set up a summary system. But I, I ended up having to use Chat GPT to do the summary instead of Gemini. And you'll laugh because Gemini couldn't get it to work through Gemini. So I asked the support people and they said, we've got a module that just links to all the AIs. Why didn't you just use that?

And I'm going, oh. And eventually got it working. So that now gives me a summary of all the newsletters, and I'll just click through them and, and if one looks interesting, then I'll go and read it. But it gives me the gist of what's going on. And, you know, if you are mad like I am and, and subscribe to too many things, that that's a good little thing. You are focused on the systems that work, so I think your systems are probably a lot more intelligent than my ones.

Anna Burgess Yang: Well, and I think with using AI you kind of have to keep tweaking them too. 'cause the systems get better, the models get better, they have maybe fewer errors or they do things that they just flat out couldn't do before. You know, when ChatGPT was first released, it was kind of a snapshot in time and it didn't have any real time information and now it can search the web.

So that opens up a lot more possibilities with what you can have these systems do.

Nigel Rawlins: So in terms of talking about AI, obviously we're beginning to see is a lot of generic rubbish out there. So how do you see a relationship between your professional wisdom and AI tools evolving. Where do you sort of draw the line between augmentation and replacement? A lot of us are using AI to augment our work, but is there a point where it's gonna replace some things and, the system you just mentioned, using Zapier was an interesting one.

Anna Burgess Yang: I use AI mostly to augment or speed up my work. So for example, you know, I I write a lot, I write on my blog um, I have an automation set up through Zapier that takes a newly published blog post and creates three or four LinkedIn posts for it, and then send through ChatGPT so it's using AI to generate the posts and then it sends those posts directly to Buffer, which is where I schedule my content. They do not go out as ChatGPT wrote them. They're not good, even with all the training in the world, it's not exactly how I would write it, but the draft is there, right? So then I can just edit and publish, which is faster than, you know, revisiting a blog post I wrote three weeks ago and trying to remember what I wrote and trying to pull out the main points. I I basically trust  ChatGPT enough to pull out the main ideas and structure a basic posts that I can then tweak and so that's faster.

So it's, it's basically augmenting work that I did anyway. There are cases where it replaced work. I have a whole system set up an Airtable that keeps track of everything I've ever written and categorizes them in categories that are meaningful to me. And before that was a manual process. You know, a new blog post would come in and I'd have to go into Airtable and select a category or have my virtual assistant do it.

Um, now  ChatGPT just runs through the blog post through Zapier and picks a category. Is it right a hundred percent of the time? Probably not. Is it right? 90% of the time? Probably. And that's good enough for what I'm doing and for the time saved and not having to think about it. That works. And so yeah, that was something that previously was manual and now I just don't even have to think about it anymore.

Nigel Rawlins: Actually that's really, really important what you've just said. 'cause I write a number of articles per week um, I mean, they're generally around the one theme, so I might write a fairly detailed blog article about the work I'm doing, then I might write a, a short little bit for a newsletter and I might put something on LinkedIn, which is a longer version of the newsletter, but cutting it up into social media posts like you've just said. I can do that, but it might be sitting on a document somewhere that I've then gotta go and find. So your systems are much, much smarter.

Anna Burgess Yang: Yeah. It's all, it's all just preloaded in Buffer. I've got, like right now in Buffer, I think there's 160 LinkedIn posts waiting for me to edit. Now, that's too much. Like I don't need that many. But when you get to something like brain surgery and you can't work for a couple of weeks. It's handy to have 160 draft posts waiting, so you can just kind of quickly go through and edit and schedule them out, and then not have to write anything for a while.

Nigel Rawlins: Well, I hope the listeners are understanding what you've just done there. You've just explained how you don't lose all this stuff, 'cause we were talking earlier about

the fact that I've written quite a lot of documents, but they were scattered everywhere, so I had to spend some time finding them all.

Putting them into a spreadsheet and figuring out what category they were, where they were, and actually to locate the document. And then think about all the social media posts I could write for each of those. And then I'm ending up with another 20 or 30 pages of documents. That's where our mind sort of gets bogged down.

And, and it worries me because, you know, it gets to a point where you say, oh, I just can't handle this anymore, I'm just gonna go for a walk. I was also gonna say that one of the things about AI is I saw this fabulous quote, and I stupidly didn't write down who said it, but you know, for people like me now, I'm gonna turn 70 next year, and I am probably writing more than I've ever written in my life. The quote I saw that seniors use AI to accelerate what they already know how to do.

I thought that's a ripper. My gut feeling is older professionals have got an advantage because they haven't always been digital. They've actually read books and can still read documents, 'cause I think a lot of people are more in tune to YouTube videos and lack attention.

Provided the older professional is still reading and looking at notes and thinking, I think AI actually gives them an edge.

Anna Burgess Yang: You know, it's interesting because, i've been like a kind of a note taker person my whole life. Like, if I read an article online, I want to have notes so I can go back and kind of connect ideas later. But like you said, how do you find all that stuff? Again, and that's kind of where AI can kinda help you sift through like colossal documents and colossal notes and say, hey, here's these two things that you read five years apart and they're connected in some way.

And so, um, that's where I think there is an advantage to people who do collect data, collect information, and maybe have all that information hoarded somewhere, even if it's in a notebook. I mean, you could take a photo and scan it and upload it to ChatGPT and still be able to kind of process through all of that.

Nigel Rawlins: That's one thing I've been doing lately. For example, if I'm looking at a website, I might take a a screenshot of that page now and say, okay, I need to refocus this page on that. What are your suggestions? I'm finding it amazing. So, where where would you say your expertise has become more valuable since AI?

Anna Burgess Yang: It's gonna sound probably pretty corny, but in, um, being, being authentic because people can generate LinkedIn posts or blog posts with speed and it's always gonna be generic because AI is always just kind of a regurgitation of everything else on the internet, right? It's not original thought.

And so I think for writers or creatives or anything, it's, it's having an opinion or a voice or something that makes you different. And so that's what makes you stand out among people who don't know how to edit. They have AI generate an email that ends up being paragraphs long or LinkedIn post that ends up being huge blocks of text or something like that. And even if it was based on their ideas, if they can't edit it, it just, it doesn't capture anybody's attention.

Nigel Rawlins: You know, I get very jealous when I look at somebody who can just write naturally by themselves. I dunno if that's a skill that's disappearing or what

Anna Burgess Yang: Yeah.

Nigel Rawlins: Now, one of the things we were speaking a bit earlier about you have the financial writing that you do, you also now write quite a lot about automation and using AI, which I find fabulous, which is why I wanted to talk to you. Um,and, and the fact that you you have two streams in your business, but you had to make a decision about, um, which stream to follow, didn't you?

Anna Burgess Yang: Yes. So this year was going to uh, the year that I focused, um, a lot more on resources for solopreneurs, which is kind of who I target. And, um, I talk, like you said, automation, AI, but I really think of it like operations, like the stuff that's happening behind the scenes, um, that I don't think a lot of people are talking about.

Like what tools to use. How do you decide which tool, how do you decide how much to spend? Basically all of your tech stack, you know, and I wanted to launch, uh, several things this year related to that. I wanted um, host a cohort of people who are interested in talking about tools and automation.

Um, I actually had the webpage ready to go. I had a wait list sign up, I was ready to launch it, and like literally two days later, I found out I had a tumor. And so I had to pause that. You know, email the people and say, I can't host this right now. And as I've come back, I'm lucky that my cognitive ability was not really impacted, but work is harder because I get fatigued very easily and I can't I can't sit upright as long, and so I had to decide

I have to focus on the client work that I do, the writing because, um, I'm good at it. I've been doing it a long time for lack of better words. It's easier for me. I can plan it better, whereas, um, the other I had to just say I can't do that right now. I'd love to. Um, you know, but I wasn't able to kind of nurture that audience because I was relying so much on guest posts and things like that.

So I'll come back maybe next year. Uh, but I had to say goodbye you know, that part of my business, at least temporarily.

Nigel Rawlins: Now you made an interesting point there about operations, the sexy part is yes, doing the client work, but you're still running a business in the background and you gotta get stuff done. So, yeah, that's one of the things I love about your newsletters because I, I love the fact that you write from an operational point of view about using tools and my biggest danger is subscribing to too many tools in American dollars.

Anna Burgess Yang: Yeah, and I think it's a, it's something that a lot of solopreneurs don't talk about, um, you know, they may talk about how to pitch clients, um, how to promote your work, maybe staying organized or productivity type of things. But I don't think people talk enough about like, well, what is actually like running your business?

Behind the scenes, like what are you relying on for project management? What are you relying on for accounting? How do you decide how much to spend? Especially, like me, I had to do kind of an audit of my tools. Say, okay, I'm not working. Can I cancel any of these for a few months? Or do they need to keep running in the background?

And some of them did. And I just think that's a conversation that's interesting, you know, like, what tools do you use? What do you like? Or have you tried this one before? And a lot of people like to geek out on that type of thing. so I think it's needed and I still wanna do it. It's just, you know, it'll have to be later.

Nigel Rawlins: Yep. looking forward to it. When you, you get into that because I, I think you are, you presented at a practical level and because you're an organized person who's running their own business, you are a great model for other people and and you've just said the right things in terms of budget.

Again, it's just shocking that the Australian dollar, a $200 a year app in Australia is $300 Australian. So for us to pay the $300, you know, that could be some client work. So, um, it, it can mount up. So yeah, you gotta be sensible. So what core apps would you say you can't live without?

Anna Burgess Yang: Well, I work with an outside accounting firm that does my bookkeeping. I did it myself for a long time, but now now I decided that was something I didn't need to do myself. But I actually have them categorize my apps into critical and non-critical, so that I look at that in my budget.

Like what are the critical apps I pay for and what are the things that are, they're nice to have. They saved me time. Push came to shove, I could cancel them. So um, Zapier is connecting everything. Airtable, um, is a pretty big one. I keep track of all my client work there and it hosts my, what I call my content library. Everything I've ever written on the internet links to the URL when it was published. Word count topics, like a whole bunch of different things. Just keeps keeps track of that. Trello is for project management. So, content that I plan to write, you know, I like, maybe it's just a half baked idea.

It's not a blog post yet, but it's like, oh, I think I could turn this into a blog post in the future. So that'll go, um, in Trello until I'm ready to work on it. I use Buffer for social media scheduling. Um, I don't think I could live without. I can't just post on the fly. I have to have it kind of scheduled out.

ChatGPT Pro, I mean, think, you know, I could live without AI If AI disappeared tomorrow, I would figure out how to go back and and do this stuff manually. But it is a huge time saver the way I've got it embedded into my systems. Um, so I would consider that. critical because it is saving me a lot of time.

I use things like Canva for graphics. I use Loom for videos. And so those are kind of the core tools that I'm touching, if not every day, pretty frequently.

Nigel Rawlins: Isn't that amazing? When you think about, you've just mentioned a half dozen tools and, and if somebody's just finishing work and they've decided they're going to continue working, they've suddenly find all these tools, but they've gotta learn them. I'm using obsidian for my notes.

Anna Burgess Yang: Oh yeah, I use a I use a Reflect, which is an Obsidian competitor. They're very similar in how they function.

Nigel Rawlins: Yeah, that's a subscription.

Anna Burgess Yang:

Nigel Rawlins: another subscription. I tried Reflect and Craft and a few others, but I'm finding, Obsidian is a free, though I pay for it to be saved in the cloud so I can access it. So that's the biggest problem if you've got it on your own computer.

What about backing up and stuff like that, because that's the other big issue. Um. I've just got into that recently. I had five little hard drives, everything backing up to it. Now I use Google Workspace for my emails and everything, and Google Workspace gives you Gemini and Notebook AI and a whole range of other things, which are really quite good. Actually, I'm I'm finding that part getting really good and I said to it, okay, what does a normal person who's organized use for backup. And, it just explained how I should, so I don't understand this. Is Google talking to me?

Anna Burgess Yang: I heard my name. I have to contribute.

Nigel Rawlins: I was gonna say, Gemini, uh, explained to me this is a good system for organizing your backups. So instead of five little things it said, set one as the major one and then set two separate ones up as a weekly backup and then set up another app to organize that. And I'm thinking, gee, I would never have thought that myself. So these things are quite helpful.

Anna Burgess Yang: Yeah, they are.

Nigel Rawlins: One of my favorite authors about business is Charles Handy, and he wrote about the second curve. So the first curve is you go to school, you go to work, and then towards the end of your work, you know, you start to decline and then maybe retire and that's it. Whereas other people, before they get to the decline, start thinking about doing something different. The idea is that you start your next curve before the end of this one. Now, your health's changed, obviously caused an unexpected pause. How has that affected your thinking about the sustainability of your business long term?

Anna Burgess Yang: It certainly made me kind of pause and think about my own basically face in the business, you know, because I think, especially growing a part of a business that, you know, where I'm an authority or trying to establish myself as authority on tools and automation, that's very dependent on me, that I am that person in the business and that is that sustainable long term, certainly all my client work is dependent on me. I know I don't outsource any of that 'cause that's what they're hiring and paying me for. But it also made me think about like, what do I, what's, what would bring me joy?

And I love talking about tools and automation, but the reality is I just don't have the energy for those things right now. But you know other things that I've wanted to do in my career is write a book. And so I'm like is that the thing that I should work on? Is that something that I can kind of do, that's maybe less taxing, 'cause I'm not I'm not on camera. I'm not leading a group. I'm not pushing social media. And so I have stepped back and said, you know, is this the season that I'm supposed to do something different. I don't know the answer to that yet. I'm okay with that. Um, but it's something that I'm exploring is maybe I just take much longer pause or, or continue to provide free resources, but don't necessarily grow that part of my business and instead focus on another thing that I've always really wanted to do.

And there's certainly nothing like, um, brain surgery to make you think, oh, maybe I don't have as much time as I thought and maybe I really want, if I wanna do this, I need to focus on it.

Nigel Rawlins: Yeah, that's the same thing that faces somebody like me who's about to turn 70. You think, oh my God, how much time have I got left? I mean, it's more scary for me in that regard. But then again, in terms of your health, you have no idea what's going to affect you. So yeah, time becomes very precious and, and you've got a young family, so I mean, you know, spending more time say writing a book than spending time with your 8-year-old, um, you know, that's a real challenge, isn't it?

Anna Burgess Yang: Yeah, and when. I first found out I had a tumor, there was a brief period of time where I didn't know if it was benign or cancerous, which obviously would've been a very different course of treatment and potential outcome. And I remember just sitting there thinking as I was waiting for the doctor to come in after an MRI, you know, what if they tell me, I've only got a couple months to live, you know, um, all I knew was that I had a tumor. And so that type of scare certainly makes you think, what can I do with the time that I have left and what if this is, what if it's gonna be really short, and then it'd be like, well, I'm gonna stop working and write this book, or I'm gonna stop working altogether and spend the time with my kids.

And so that type of priority shifts, um. I don't say I wish it on anybody. It was certainly like some of the scariest hours of my life. But, um, it it has since made me think in a much different way about who I am, what I wanna do, how I spend time with my family, and certainly the business that I've been building for the past few years.

Nigel Rawlins: Yeah, and that makes me think about, you know, us being in business that we don't want it to be draining. We don't want it to dominate our time, that we don't have time for the special people in our lives. And, you know, I wanna say to some of the younger people, you know, um, if you've got older, elderly parents, do spend time with them and do spend time with your friends and your family.

It would be wrong to, you know, spend 20 hours a day working on a business because you think, you know that's gonna make your life better. You're gonna end up neglecting people who are special, especially when your kids grow up and they move, to different countries and you can't see them so easily, but at least we can talk to them on the phone nowadays. I I traveled overseas in 1980, and in those days you didn't have the internet and to find out news from home was very very hard. And you'd, you'd end up waiting for a letter at a post office, though you'd do Post Restante. So you'd you'd end up in a a city, in a foreign country and go to the post office and hopefully there'd be a letter waiting from home.

That's a very different way to today. Like you just message your kid and say, oh, dad, dad's not picking you up. Get on the bus or something like that. Or, you know, I get on Messenger and talk to my son in Whistler in Canada, who I will visit next year. I hate planes, so geez, I'm, I hope he realizes I'm making a big effort, sit on a plane for 13 hours to come and see him, but I will spend the whole time staying with him.

I'm not gonna go and visit anywhere else in Canada. Get off the plane, get on the bus, go and stay with him. And now he'll have to work and his wife works, but I'll see him in between, which I, I, I'm looking forward to. Okay. Now, if you were to design a business from scratch today, knowing what you know about health vulnerability and AI capabilities and the actual work involved in being a solo business.

What would you do differently from the start?

Anna Burgess Yang: You know, I was on a podcast earlier this year, and the the name, the podcast itself is Freelance Mistakes. And, you know, it's supposed to be advice for other freelancers to say like, what would you do differently if you were starting over? And so the the host asked me something very similar, um, and I said, very honestly, I wouldn't do anything differently. Um, I, I had financially planned, that, you know, I was able to take a few months off and not worry about income, um, I did have to shut my business down, but I had built relationships with my clients and they were willing to keep working with me even after a pause. Um, I'm organized enough that I had everything was prepped and ready to go by the time I, um, had surgery.

And, you know, I was able to rely on other people. And so I I don't know that I would do anything differently, um, other than just say maybe, screw it, everything can just pause. And I'm gonna enjoy these couple weeks before surgery and just spend time with my family. But I think that by itself was stressful.

I needed the distraction. That's just the type of person I am. So that worked and I I don't know that I would've done any, anything differently.

Nigel Rawlins: I think that's pretty good, but people need to have a listen to that earlier episode with you because they'll see how organized you were. I mean, you you taught me a lot. Um, in many ways listening to you on that one is I'm thinking I'm, I can be very disorganized, but I've had to learn to be more organized because I'm doing so much writing now that I, I'll get lost in it all.

Anna Burgess Yang: You know one thing I want to create, and I don't know when, but I want to create like a checklist for people who are maybe solopreneurs who have a health scare or, or, um, need to take care of a loved one and they kind of need to step back, because I think being as organized as I am, I knew exactly what to do and I could see other people just freezing and saying, like, and, and on top of the stress of dealing with a health scare, just freezing saying, I don't know what to do next.

And, I wanna create like a checklist or a resource or an ebook or something that says, this is what you should do. Like, if you just need somebody to tell you what to do, I will tell you what to do and take that burden, that mental burden off of you, and you can spend the time actually doing these things if that's what you wanna put in place.

Nigel Rawlins: That would be fantastic. Look, I, I think that that would be very helpful. Um, that's the big issue, isn't it? That when you come across something you dunno what to do with, where do you start? Now people probably heard me talk about the fact that I started learning Krav Maga 18 months ago. And the whole point about the first thing you learn in Krav Maga which is the Israeli self-defense, is not to freeze in a, um, in a situation that you know, somebody is angry with you or they're coming at you.

You don't freeze that you have a system to dealwith it, and that's what you're offering there. And I think that would be very handy. Don't freeze because you can fall apart in many ways, and you're vulnerable. I think you, you are a wonderful example of running a resilient business with a very supportive network too, from the sounds of it. Anna, I've run outta things to say, Anna, what else should we talk about? Is there something we haven't covered?

Anna Burgess Yang: I don't think so. Nobody ever really expects to, to to get that kind of health news that I got. And I think, you know, for solo business owners out there, it is, it's terrifying. And you know, for everybody listening today that is healthy, I would say, think about what if all of a sudden you couldn't attend to your business for a couple of months?

What would you do? What could you put in place today? Just to make it a little easier because the thing about doing all that work, that prep work is then I could kind of not think about it. I didn't have to worry about my business running while I was lying in a hospital bed. It was just kind of running in the background with the help of people and systems. \ And so I didn't have to stress at at a time that was otherwise incredibly stressful in my life for, for other reasons. So, nobody likes to think about it, but you kind of have to.

Nigel Rawlins: Very good advice, Anna. Where can people find you?

Anna Burgess Yang: The best place would be I've got a website, start dot anna b yang.com. I've got some free resources there, and that's kind of like a landing with, they call all my socials and my, my website and things like that. So that's kind of the place where to go other

places.

Nigel Rawlins: Great, and you're on LinkedIn,

Anna Burgess Yang: I am on LinkedIn. I've run out of prescheduled content at this point. So I need to start writing. I need to start writing things again.

Nigel Rawlins: I, I'll put all these links in the show notes. So Anna, thank you very much for being my guest and I'm so glad that you are recovering well and good luck with the recovery.

Anna Burgess Yang: Thank you. I appreciate it.