Making the Hard Turn from Employee to Freelancer
Forced into Freelancing — How to Negotiate the Hardest Turn in Life
Lots of articles will tell you how to become a freelancer and gain financial freedom and time-independence while working a job — a side hustle is how they refer to it, I believe.
Some of them will even tell you how to quit your job so you can be your own boss. Most of them will have “make the leap”, “take the plunge”, “quit your job and be an entrepreneur” in their title.
I don’t use those phrases, and you’ll understand why once you’ve read my story.
I’m not knocking these articles. They’re fantastic because they encourage you to think out of the box and create a life for yourself, not just a living.
But they’re all missing one thing: how do you deal with losing a job and having no prospects other than the ones you were “trained” for? How do you make that hard turn from being a yes-boss guy to a no-boss guy? The fundamentals a totally different, aren’t they?
In such a scenario, you don’t have the time to plan a course of action, you don’t have the money to take a risk, and you certainly don’t have the confidence that a steady job gives you, no matter how false that sense of job security might be.
I lost my job in 2009 because they shut down my department. I was the head of Customer Service for the largest online photo library in the world.
I had my own parking spot, a seat at the management table, nice cash bonuses twice a year, and all the fancy perquisites that go with a job in a “great to work for” company.
Until it was a “not so great to work for” company. The next day, July 2, 2009, I was out of a job. Just like that. It was my 34th birthday.
The timing was the worst of it. I was just starting my family. My wife and I had moved to a new city for this job, our son was two years old, and I had zero savings in the bank. Like many young-ish professionals, I was working from paycheck to paycheck.
As much as you think you can imagine my state of mind at the time, you can’t. Unless you’ve been put through the agonizing pain of losing a steady income with a family in tow, you can’t know the pain, the tension, the sheer psychological pressure of not knowing what you’re going to do when the rent is due.
But this is not a sob story. Over the years, I’ve built a very successful freelance business and have clients all over the world. This is the story of how I got from there to here.
My Tryst with Destiny
I’d love to be able to say that I landed on my feet and things went smoothly as I transitioned to a life of freelancing. By, hey, I wouldn’t have this story to tell if I did, right?
It was worst than I had ever imagined. I must have attended about 40 interviews for every position from the VP of Customer Service to Level 1 Customer Service Executive. Absolutely nothing. I was either overqualified or too old or too young or just “not right for the job”.
You can’t imagine how many times I’ve gotten that dreaded phone call saying, “I’m afraid we’ve decided not to move forward with your application at this time.”
Every time they said they were afraid, I became more afraid.
The one thing that kept me going was HOPE. I knew I had the skills to get by in a lot of different roles. I just needed the opportunity. I was confident it would come.
It did not.
By the time I realized I needed to try something else, I was deeply in debt, I’d sold my second car, I’d defaulted on all my credit cards, my credit was shot, I’d sold my wife’s gold jewelery (and most of her mom’s and my mom’s, too.)
I was hanging on to that HOPE by one frazzled, fraying thread.
And then it came. A dim ray of light that I almost overlooked.
It was a requirement from an old friend of mine for some articles for his company’s blog.
I said yes right away, but little did I know that they would squeeze the life out of me. I was asked to write 400 articles of 350 words each for a grand sum of $800. And they wanted everything done in 3 weeks!
I was ecstatic, not realizing how much work it would involve. But by this time, I was ready to do anything to support my family.
I used to get up at 4.30 am and work until 2 pm, after which I’d eat lunch and have a quick nap. I’d start again at 5 pm and work until 11 pm. It was written, write, write for 15 1/2 hours a day for three weeks straight.
By the end of those three weeks, my fingers ached, my shoulders ached, my butt hurt, my head hurt, my eyes hurt… in fact, I don’t think there was any part of my body that didn’t scream in pain when it was moved.
Except for my soul.
I had found a new calling — writing. And it had taken me a full year and a half to realize that this is what I would do for the rest of my life. I was reborn.
My Life Since 2011 — I’ll Keep it Short
By the way, I only got paid half the money for that project. They never paid me the rest. But after that first stint at the keyboard, I had once again regained the confidence of a working professional. But this time, it was real. I wasn’t hiding behind a business card and a title. I was exposed to the world, and I had shown the world that I could handle whatever it threw at me.
That was a very valuable lesson I learned prior to 2011.
I won’t tell you that I suddenly started making thousands of dollars a month and am now financially independent. No, sir.
However, nine years later, I now make what I made as a corporate executive, and I have both pride and humility as my armor. The pride comes from being able to take care of my family and give them what they deserve, but there’s always an underlying humility that I hope never leaves me.
I don’t think it will.
I struggled to go from struggling through that first project to having a steady roster of clients who relied on me for their content. It took me no less than two years from there before the word “steady” could be used to describe my monthly income.
Suffice it to know that I struggled until 2013 to get steady gigs. In fact, that’s when I started getting real “clients” — businesses that wanted me to stay with them for years and years.
Today, I still work hard. Let there be no doubt about that. But I don’t have to work 15 1/2 hours typing mindless drivel until bone touches plastic and the only reason I keep typing is that my legs have gone to sleep and I can’t get up.
It is now November 2020, and I live in a nice house on the beach (rented, yes, but still pretty expensive), I have two dogs, and I’m getting my wife a new iPhone this week — just because I CAN! I love this life!
But I don’t want you to know about my successes, the amounts I’ve been paid to write certain projects, etc. I’m not going to show you my earnings or try to impress you under the guise of validating my credibility with you. If you’ve reached this paragraph, you’ll know that I’m for real.
I’m not here to give you the kind of hope you’re looking for. That HOPE has to come from within. If you hang on to that no matter what, the rest will follow.
What I’d rather do is give you some guidance that will help you get to wherever you want to go.
A lamp to light the way is sometimes far more useful than a map and a description of the destination, especially if your path is unlit and you have to feel your way through one step at a time.
What you can see right in front of you is usually more important than what you can’t see a mile ahead. Both are required, but the present is where you can take tangible action, not the future.
#1: The Only Goal is the One in Front of You
The first thing I will tell you is that if you try something for long enough and have seen intermittent results along the way, don’t give up that path. It will take you where you need to go. Not where you want to go, perhaps, but definitely where you need to go.
As you may have guessed by now, there’s really no “secret formula” to succeed. Each follows his or her own path. If one man’s success secrets worked for everyone, the last book on the subject would have probably been Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich.
We all know that if you keep doing something with your heart in it, you’ll be good at it one day. Not the best, maybe, but pretty good. The awesome thing about that is the fact that you don’t need to be the best at something to make a great living from it. Not everyone is a Jeff Bezos or an Elon Musk but Amazon is not the only eCommerce retailer in the world making money and Tesla is not the only electric car company that’s growing like wildfire.
Understand that and you’ll realize that opportunity is abundant. It does not knock at your door just once. It waits patiently on the other side of the threshold, just waiting for you to open the door. Most of us simply don’t.
There’s a saying in certain business communities in my country that if you operate any business for 1000 days by giving it all you have, you will eventually succeed.
The method of execution here is very simple: keep your eye on the ball. You need a goal or a target of some sort at all times.
If it’s 2 am and you’re dog-tired and just about ready to stop, then stop. But take a moment to recall why you’re doing this in the first place — whatever it is — and you’ll find a surge of energy that carries you for another 30 minutes.
Do that over and over again until the job is done, and you have found the path to success. Going from employed to self-employed is not always a “plunge” or a “leap” into the unknown. Sometimes, the unknown can be just that first step you take in a new direction.
#2: Know What You Want
And that’s exactly why knowing your destination is the only way to get there.
But even if you don’t have a clear picture, at least have a clear understanding of what it would mean for you to reach that destination. Will it be that you’ll stop worrying about your health? Or that you’ll start being kinder to your brother? Those are destinations, too, you know.
In other words, understand what you’re working for and it will be yours if you work to reach that goal, whether it’s an achievement or just a better state of mind.
For me, the first goal was to stop worrying about rent money. That’s it. Nothing more, and definitely nothing less.
Can you start off with a small goal like that?
I’m not asking you not to dream about the beachfront property in Nice, France, or your own private jet. Dream on, I say.
But dream first about the solution to your most immediate and most painful problem.
That should be your only priority in life at any given point in time.
If you can focus all your energies (and I don’t use the plural lightly) on that one single goal at a time, you, my friend, can write the next best-selling self-help book!
#3: Make Grand Plans for the Future
At the same time, don’t give up on those huge goals that you have for your life, love, finances, etc. Keep your focus on the now but have those bigger goals in the fuzzy distance. Like portrait mode on the iPhone.
The bigger goals should be your life’s bokeh effect. And they’re important because they bring a sense of urgency to your immediate goal.
We can only focus on one thing at a time but we can dream of infinite possibilities. Let those possibilities float hazily in the background while your efforts are directed at the one immediately in front of you.
Then, when you pass your first goal, the next will automatically be in focus.
For me, the first goal was not having to worry about next month’s rent. Once that started happening, the next goal was to make sure my son and my wife had everything they needed. Not wanted. That will eventually come. Just what they needed.
Whether it was a school trip that would expand my son’s mind or hiring a maid and a cook so my wife wouldn’t have to spend the whole day on her feet, I wanted to make that happen for them.
Once I started making that happening, my focus shifted to small luxuries that were within reach of our current financial situation — eating out whenever we wanted, buying some jewelery on a whim, buying that iPhone…
I’m able to do all of that comfortably now, so my next focus is on holidays outside the country, making enough money to invest in the stock market without worrying about losing it, and so on.
I’m not going to stop there. I still dream of owning that luxury car, buying a home where I can take care of 100 stray dogs, taking a chartered flight to an exotic destination with my family, etc.
That day will come. But as long as I focus fully on my most immediate goal, I know I will get there one day.
I have made that hard turn. Now it’s yours.
