
Turning Your Freelance Career Into a Business
Introduction — The Benefits of Being a Business and Not a Freelancer
Freelancers and businesses both exchange goods and services for money, so what’s the difference between them? If you’re, for example, consulting clients and helping them develop websites, is that not a business? In a way, but for our purposes, we will differentiate between them: ask yourself, if you take yourself out of the equation of your system, are you still making money?
Businesses create models, or systems, of business that can automate and run on their own, in a sense. Take the previous example, of web development. If you start hiring employees to distribute work on parts of the website, creating something larger than yourself, then you’ve begun to create a business. You can take a vacation and your employees will still have kept the system, or business, running. Of course you still have to be highly involved in a business, but turning your freelance career into something larger can have many benefits.
- Once a business is established, work becomes more stable. Freelance work can come and go sometimes and there is a lot of uncertainty about where your next paycheck will come from.
- Businesses put fewer limits on your ability to grow your income. One person can only work so many hours in a day but hiring employees will enable you to distribute work and grow your client base.
- Businesses can allow you to focus on what you’re passionate about. If you are a web developer and love coding but aren’t so into the designing, hiring a graphic designer will allow you to get that aspect out of the way and focus on programming the coolest website possible for your client. The plus of this, is that someone who can focus on graphic design will probably be able to create even better graphics than you had before. This will make your product even better.
