How to scale a freelance business, I think.
When I started freelancing almost a year ago, I took any marketing job that came my way. It didn’t matter if it was a marketing task I was particularly good at, if I knew how to do it at all, I’d take the job because I was eager to grow my client base and therefore “the business.”
Later I got better at defining what work I was good at delivering as a service and what was more likely to go off the rails because had trouble turning it into a “deliverable.” So I started defining what I would and wouldn’t do as a freelancer.
To save myself time and to keep projects within scope, I structured my work into packaged deliverables. While this made my life easier, saying “this is how I do things, take it or leave it” meant I stopped winning every job I bid on. Clients like it better when they tell you what they need and you just tell them how much it costs.
Soon I realized it’s okay to say no to work you don’t want to do, but you have to have the opportunity to say yes to the work you do want to do. I was turning down work, but I also wasn’t doing anything to control the offers of work that were crossing my desk. Word of mouth, grateful as I was for it, meant I was only able to respond to offers of work that just sort of happened to come my way. And it wasn’t always what I wanted to be doing.
The risk of this laissez faire approach to acquiring work means that I could keep saying no and not work, or I could keep saying yes to — and being mediocre at — work I didn’t really want, eventually branding myself as a shitty version of a thing I didn’t even want to be.
To really be successful in freelancing, I realized, you have to:
1. Define what it is you do well and stick to that work as much as you can
2. Find a way to get a steady stream of people to hire you for that work
I needed to create a plan to get the kind of work I wanted to be doing and was good at. But this required me to get out from under the client projects I was working on and to treat “branding myself and getting clients” like a project in itself.
So I hired a freelance friend of mine to complete some client work on my behalf while I worked on branding and business development. My client was paying a high enough hourly rate that I could afford to pay my friend to do the work AND skim a percentage off the top for myself.
At first I felt guilty. Even though my friend was happy to have the work and I was paying her a higher rate than she made at previous freelance gigs, it felt wrong to profit from her labor.
But then I realized: that’s a business.
As a freelancer I can only make as much money as I can charge clients per hour multiplied by the hours I have in the week to complete the work.
This means I have to find a steady pipeline of clients willing to pay my hourly rate AND I have to fill most of my working hours with billable work.
Unless I had a single client paying the bulk of those hours, which is risky, filling that pipeline of paying clients requires business development, and doing biz dev cuts into the number of billed hours I can work.
And that caps the amount of money I’m able to make, much like my income was capped when I was an employee.
But, I thought, as a business I can scale, hiring people to complete work so I can focus on growing the business.
Which got me thinking: why am I even tying the work I do to hours billed in the first place? If I were selling t-shirts, I wouldn’t be pricing them based on the hours it took to make them multiplied by an hourly rate. I would price them based on cost and their perceived value in the marketplace while trying to decrease my costs on materials and labor.
What if I could “productize” some of my services so I could focus on getting the time and materials it takes to produce them down? As long as the value remains the same to the client — they get the end result they’re looking for, like a working AdWords campaign or an SEO-optimized website — what difference does it make if it took me 6 hours or 30 minutes to complete the work? The clients might even like this approach better because I can tell them exactly how much a particular service costs.
The way I saw it, there were two approaches to doing this work.
- Packaged services, so there is still a 1-to-1, personalized relationship with the client even if I’m not billing them by hour.
- Packaged products, so I can create something once that helps people achieve their marketing goals and sell it over and over again without having to provide 1-on-1 support for it, like an online course, template, or piece of software.
I’m not the first person to think this way — pretty much any client-facing person with a shred of business sense will come to this conclusion. But it’s important for me because:
- It represents a path working parents can take to free up their hours and spend more time with their kids.
- It allows me to hire freelancers I know, many of whom are working parents, so some of them don’t have to seek out full-time jobs that don’t allow them that flexibility. That’s ambitious and definitely a “stretch goal,” but it’s something I’d like to do.
After several months of planning I have now launched my initial attempt at “productizing” some of the services I provide as well as standardizing the hourly work I do. I still need to create packaged products, but in three months I gave the business a name, built a brand and website, and am now attempting to sell my work based on this new approach.
It hasn’t been easy. In some ways, putting a packaged price on my services devalues the work I do in some people’s eyes, maybe those people who were willing to pay me my full hourly rate to do whatever marketing thing they needed. That’s a scary concept, and much like the first time I started telling people “no,” I’ve experienced a slight dip in work.
I have definitely made this harder on myself in the beginning because I now have to market and sell these services I’ve packaged and productized. But I think ultimately this will result in more freedom and flexibility in the work I do. At least that’s what I hope.
If you’re interested in what the final product of my packaged freelance services looks like, check out Small Craft Advisory.
This is part 3 of a 3-part series I wrote about quitting my job to freelance. Part 1 is about the plans I made (read: none, really) when I decided to start freelancing. Part 2 detailed all the fun stuff I learned about making a freelance gig work.
I will continue to write about this process as it unfolds. Thanks for all your support so far!
