Is freelancing a stepping-stone or a career? The long-term plan…

After doing freelance work for about 5 years now, I think you have to really run it and plan it like a business if you want to do it long-term and as a career. Just like a business you have to set short-term goals (ie, number of billable hours, or billable projects you will have in the next 12–18 months), and long term plans.

Long term planning?

The long-term planning of a freelance business is, I think where most freelancers fall short — they want to just make sure they have enough clients and new work coming in for the next few months or even 6 months down the road, but it’s difficult to step back and look at the work you do and plan it as a business. You have to be disciplined and schedule yourself into planning sessions.

When I worked full time, these sessions seemed like an overly drawn-out process that usually didn’t reach anything dramatically different from what the business already did. And planning the sales targets usually meant cobbling together a spreadsheet that had about a thousand assumptions behind it which at the end of the day had to ‘feel right and have the right options’ in terms of the business growth rate. That’s because these are big businesses and not so agile — you are different, you can add new parts to your service easily — if you’re a freelance copywriter for an ad agency, for example, you can do QA of their online properties, or write their social media posts, or extend your service to help write their RFP responses.

There is a reason every business goes through this exercise at least once a year (usually more) to look at their overall business, what’s working, what’s not, what are areas they could get new business, how can they feasibly change or add to their offering to tap into new markets.

These are questions you should constantly be thinking about anyway as you work with different types of clients. But the important thing is to make it a regular part of your work — schedule a ‘my freelance work review and planning session’ every 3 months — look at the work you’ve done during this time, have any projects gone really well or did you see potential to add to your offering with any clients that can mean extra revenue for you. This might mean that you have to educate yourself on how to perform this new service, but it’s worth it and it keeps your business growing.

Meeting with myself??

This ‘session’ doesn’t have to be a big production — it’s a nice break that you take for a couple of hours over a few days in the mornings, you go to a different location than you usually would, you do not answer client calls for a few hours, and you focus on this. It’s important.

If you have ‘friendly’ clients that you trust, I would run your potential plans for add-on services or even a shift in your services by them. See what their feedback is — this is also important.

Business Review

You should review your revenues every year to see how it stacks up against the previous year — you want to have a healthy growth in your revenue. I bill by the hour so I make sure I increase my rate by at least 5%-10% every year.

You will only be able to turn this into a long-term career if you plan it well and think of your freelance work as a business. Otherwise you will most likely do it for a few years, have some great clients, but not see the real growth necessary to keep up with your life needs. I think this is why many people go back to full-time jobs after a few years.

If you want to be free from a career like that you have to put in the work to grow your business.