This is in conversation from Apple News. I'm Julia Carpenter filling in for Shimita Vassu. Today, how to become your own boss. Since the pandemic, we've seen a significant uptick in the number of people deciding to become self-employed,

giving up their 9 to 5 jobs and becoming their own boss. In fact, I'm one of them.

Earlier this year, I quit my full-time job at the Wall Street Journal and decided to do something

I've wanted to do for a long time. I decided to go freelance. And while I love the freedom it gives me, it's scary to make the leap.

Being your own boss means figuring out how to structure your day, health insurance, becoming an

accountant, and setting good boundaries, which is why I called up Paco de Leon.

After I got fired from my last job, it allowed me to sit and ask, what does the world need of me? What does the world want of me? What am I good at? How can I serve?

Peko has become something of an expert on what it takes to be your own boss.

She left her finance job and started her own firm called the Hell Yeah Group.

She houses a book called Finance for the People and she hosts the podcast Weird Finance.

Later in this episode, Paco is going to answer your questions

about making this leap into self-employment.

But she started off by telling me

that one of her earliest lessons

came from her days playing in a band as a teenager living in LA.

We would book a show and then what we would do which was sneaky, but it really like sets the tone for who I am as a person

is the day before the show we would write to the bar and we would say, by the way, none of us

are 21. However, we have reviewed the penal code and in the city of Los Angeles,

performers who are under 21 are legally permitted to be inside of the bar while performing.

So here's the code and you know see you tomorrow.

And so those lessons were like you know there was no one who was going to tell us like this is how you

hack something, this is how you get shows, this is how you build an audience, this is how you

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