How to Optimize Your Freelancing Business
Jumping into the world of freelancing is a challenging hurdle, one that requires foresight, preparedness, and courage. Setting yourself up for success for a career shift to freelancing is a huge part of how profitable your business will become. However, once you make the leap, your business will not run itself. On top of the work you do for your clients, you will have to be your own boss, accountant, marketing, and sales department. With all of these moving parts, knowing how to optimize your freelancing business could make the difference between sinking or swimming.
These are some of my best recommendations for freelancers to optimize their business in order to guarantee success.
1. Become Your Own Boss
As an independent worker, you will no longer have the guidance, push, and expectations of a supervisor. This can seem like a massive relief at first, but as you move forward in your career, you’ll notice that having someone looking over your work and checking your performance does make some aspects of working much easier. Having clear expectations and goals for yourself, followed by self-responsibility and reflection, will be necessary for making sure you stay on track in your new career.
To help yourself judge your performance, consider becoming part of a freelancer community, getting a mentor, or banding together with a few creatives in your friend’s group. Receiving feedback from outside sources and other industry experts will help you continue to improve your work, even while freelancing.
2. Learn How to Manage Your Time
Operating as a freelancer is not as ‘free and easy’ as it may sound. To have a viable career as a freelancer you must be your own advertising, HR, sales, and finance departments, on top of your actual work for clients. Most people don’t realize that a freelancer’s time spent on client projects accounts for only 25-35% of their actual work hours. Within your first couple months of work, you should learn to be diligent with your work hours, charge your clients the correct amount to cover all your work hours (as well as overhead costs), and dedicate certain amounts of time to each part of your business. This will help keep your business moving forward in all avenues.
Getting a timekeeping or project planning app such as Cushion or Toggl can be immensely helpful in keeping track of time-worked for clients, as well as planning out your schedule for the entire year. Remember--as a freelancer, you’re also responsible for planning your ‘paid’ vacation days, and having dates set up beforehand can help you know how much time you actually have available when bidding for gigs.
3. Always Use Contracts
One of the most dreaded things to deal with as a freelancer is unhappy or unpaying clients. These are always risks in this industry, but if you don’t set expectations with an official document at the beginning of your client relations, you will be much more venerable to these sticky situations. Even if you are working for friends or long-term clients, being prepared for anything will keep your business healthy.
Letters of Agreement, engagement agreements, and contracts all aim to make sure that everyone involved knows what work is expected, by when, and how much compensation will be paid. It also lays out what might happen in unexpected situations, such as if the contractor isn’t able to finish the work or if the client no longer needs the work. Contracts protect you legally, as well as practically by making sure you and your client are on the same page. It’s best if you can work with a lawyer to build a contract template for you to use with all your clients. If you don’t have a lawyer and you live in Singapore, the Law Society offers pro bono legal services and has free legal clinics all over the island. Otherwise, Shake Law is a popular app to generate contracts.
4. Keep Your Clients Long-term
Getting hired for gigs, setting up terms, and creating a relationship with clients all takes time, which you don’t want to keep repeating job after job. Once you get hired by clients that you like for jobs that you like, work hard to keep those clients. Having a steady, reliable client base will be a huge help in providing steady income and will help you scale your business. The key to keeping clients long-term is providing them high-value.
You can implement several strategies in keeping your clients long-term. One, of course, is to always deliver quality work on time. Another is to suggest business-building projects that will be on-going. For example, if you’re a copywriter, you can suggest doing monthly newsletters for a client’s customer base that will grow their revenue. Another strategy is to stay in touch with your favorite clients even if you’re not currently doing work for them. Sending them industry news that relates to them helps keep you top of mind, and they remember how much value you bring.
5. Continued Learning
In corporate and office jobs, you’re often exposed to continued learning in the form of in-house or paid training and mentorships. As a freelancer, you won’t have access to this type of guidance unless you seek it out. Making a commitment to upgrade your skills regularly can help keep you marketable and profitable. In addition to your own sellable skills, learning more about entrepreneurship is also vital in helping your business run smoothly in the long run.
A plethora of online learning platforms for every type of creative work makes continuing education easy. Sites like Udemy, General Assembly, and Coursera all offer in-depth online classes that you could use to uplevel your skills or become a better businessperson. Our platform, CreativesAtWork, offers continued training for freelancers specifically. If you live in Singapore, you may be eligible for a stipend from the government for Continued Education Training. This stipend would cover a number of the online classes mentioned above, or classes at NUS’ School of Continuing and Lifelong Education and SMU’s Professional and Continuing Education school.
Doing it all on your own can be challenging in the freelancing world, but having workable actions to make sure your business is running smoothly can be the key you need. All it really takes is a plan and discipline!
Want to learn more about optimizing your freelancing business? Check out our ebook, The Business of Freelancing: How to Thrive as a Freelancer.
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