Freelance Consulting — The Right Choice for you?
In this post I share my reflections on whether to pursue freelance consulting for a living. These thoughts are not all encompassing, but hopefully help you make the right personal decision if you are thinking about turning freelance. Here it goes...
…when leaving my long-term job in an ecommerce company, I planned to take 6 months off to consider my options, spend more time with the family, do more exercise. Consulting and working as a freelancer happened by accident. With “by accident”, I mean that driven by curiosity (and time at hand despite family&exercise), I met with all kinds of people, discussed their challenges, started to help out and all of the sudden, I was working again. Let me correct this! It didn’t really feel like working, it felt more like iterative learning and teaching at the same time. At the same time job opportunities starting coming in. While considering these options, I started to reflect on why consulting (part of which is also pro bono) feels so intrinsically rewarding for me. Two questions lie at the basis of my reflections:
- Why is helping companies and start-ups rewarding for me?
- What if I gave consulting a true shot?
If you are currently considering a transformation, I highly recommend listening or reading the book by James E. Ryan, Dean of the Harvard School of Education on the 5 essential questions in life.
Reflection #1: Can you deal with uncertainty?
Having a role, a job title, colleagues, a company to work for, and pay slip at the end of the month reduces uncertainty in your life. While the monetary part is straight forward, I think the social/psychological part is the much tougher part to overcome. This is particular true for all of you, who have been employed for quite some time. All these anchoring aspects above are gone when turning freelance. And while shaping your business is great at times, the uncertainty is at the same time intimidating.
People will hammer you with questions asking you to explain why you are freelancing. Some will put it nicely in a sentence like “this is brave, I have also been thinking about freelancing” others will be more straightforward “Isn’t this a bit risky?”. These questions will make you nervous at times, as you will typically feel that you should have a better plan for starting your own business. On the other hand, I think Mark Twain said it best:
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and starting on the first one.”
If your gut says “yes” and your highly trained brain says “rationalize the decision further”, my recommendation is to literally write down “the worst thing that could happen” and then take the decision.
Reflection #2: Do you love to learn?
I love learning about new things both at the theoretical/class room level as well as the applied level. There are three successful habits, when it comes to learning and improving your skill set:
- Take the time (while not earning money, fees) and invest in learning
- Expose yourself to situations / people outside your current context
- Understand every new project and every collaboration as an opportunity to learn and try to codify the learnings into routines
I believe that investing your time in learning is worth giving up on earning opportunities in the short run. If you don’t agree and rather favor money in your pocket today, turning towards freelance consulting might not be a good idea. This is not saying that you will not be a good consultant, rather that the opportunity to learn as consultant is not as rewarding for you. Summing up:
Total Income = Intrinsic Rewards + Fees
Reflection #3: Are you introverted or extroverted?
Introversion means that you gain strength and energy from self-reflecting on new topics. Extroverts on the other hand, tend to gain energy up-on interacting with peers. The important part for me is the order on how exchange with other and self-reflections happen.
If you are introvert you tend to self-reflect first and then seek feedback from you peers, and then withdraw and reflect again. The exchange with peers will be important for you, but you absolutely do not mind spending time on your own while working.
The extrovert will turn the order around - as he/she will first exchange with the peers and then sort it out afterwards. Reflection is also valued by the extrovert, but rather than dwelling to long on any issue, the extrovert enjoys the interaction. As such working in a team environment and exchanging with customers will be important for the extrovert than the introvert.
I think both extrovert and introvert can be great at freelance consulting, but the type of consulting project they prefer will be different. For me as an introvert, having the time to work on my own with limited exchange at times is highly rewarding and compatible with my type of consulting. For all you introverts check out the site from Susan Cain (I love it ):
Extroverts, on the other hand, should seek projects with a strong level of embedness with the customer organization.
Reflection #4: Do you enjoy giving?
A key motivation of being a freelance consultant is the ability to choose the people to work with and the projects to work on. For me this includes helping out with free advice and becoming engaged in projects I believe in. Specifically, I work with two very small tech start-ups without charging them. While I learn a lot (see reflection #2), I believe that giving will enrich your working & personal life by creating options you cannot really anticipate or grasp today.
In addition, it also means, that I value the customer relationship over a short term gain. While consultants do not have the best reputation in business, why should customer and consultant not form a long-term relationship based on trust and transparency?
For me this has meant:
- advicing customer not to go ahead with a consulting project, which made made limited sense in my perspective.
- advicing customer to device strategies and reallocate focus to strenghten internal ressources rather to create dependecies on external agencies and consultants.
Customers are puzzled at first when this happens. But at the same time once they see the sincereness, this creates a great deal of trust and partnership (which per se I value when working). I love the book by Adam Grant on this:
While this post is based on my personal reflections and each of you will need to find their own reasons to decide for or against freelancing, I hope my line of thoughts do help. The good news is, that I see decision makers increasingly adopting a network view of knowledge, which also includes expert freelancers. Differently put, as talent is scarce, companies will be more successful if they systematically manage their freelance network.
If you are interested to learn more, I have also published a small infographic, in which described the different stages, I went through. The infographic also shows the importance of finding collaborators and gives an outlook towards starting my own company.
Happy to receive you comments & thoughts.
