Filling calligraphy orders at 2 a.m. and writing freelance gigs during lunch breaks was my life since about the time I graduated college in 2010.

For years, I struggled feeling very insecure as an artist and writer. I wasn’t a real calligrapher, because I pitched media for Chick-fil-A and drafted email marketing copy for Delta AIr Lines during the day. I wasn’t a real freelance writer, because for sometimes 10 hours a day I was billing clients at a PR agency.

Today, if you’re finding yourself split between your side passion project and your corporate job, I want to do two things.

I want to affirm you as a real creative, and I want to hold your hands, look you in the eye, and tell you I don’t once regret corporate life.

In fact, it has put me at the top of my game as a freelancer.

Here are 3 things I learned in agency life that I would suggest you master before wading the freelance waters.

Organizational Systems

Specifically at Jackson Spalding, I became a process mastermind. I knew I had a knack for organizing information, but it was actually after I left JS that I realized the impact working on teams has for your organizational skills.

Starting my own business, it only made sense to carve out a business plan, project tracker, quarterly sales goals tracker, budgeting systems, Dropbox file organization systems, email folder filing systems, media lists, and more. I did that within the first 3 days of being full-time. Working at a firm lends itself to shared knowledge, which HAS to be organized: there are too many hands in the same pot to be unorganized.

Working for a corporate company or agency will explain this in a big way.

Working Under the Masters

I’ll never forget turning in my first draft at Southern Living. I’ll spare you the details and suffice it to say my editor gave me back a document bleeding in red, inky edits. Over at the PR agency, I worked under the industry’s brightest communications and marketing minds, who understood they held a Fortune 500 company’s reptuation in their hands with every carefully chosen word and marketing message. I sat in on brand excavations for huge banks and small non-profits, and took pages of notes I still keep.

It’s cool when I think about it now: I feel like I was essentially paid to be mentored by these professionals. Yes, I worked super hard, but I gained tremendous expertise from that job.

Terrifying? Unbelieveably. I got thick skin fast. But my gosh, did I learn.

Time Management

Finally, working in an agency or in corporate, you’re on another’s dime. Particularly if you bill clients, you learn that every 15 minutes of your time? That’s money, honey. When a client is paying you for your time, you learn to be uber-efficient, both for them, and for yourself. Basically, billing time means compartmentalizing every say, 15 minutes of your day. Billing time taught me to batch like-projects before it was cool.

To be honest, I got so addicted to billing time that when I went on to serve as a chef’s publicist, it was difficult for me to transition to a world where meetings would spring up and interrupt me in the middle of a project!

I write this because I feel like there’s a lot of pitchfork in the air attitude towards corporate life. Girl, learn to love it if you dream of doing something on your own one day as a creative. It will sharpen you like nothing else!