How to Start Your Freelance Career
MOWE was created by two Designers that were experiencing the Freelance world. Both of us had numerous experiences related to work, since day job until building our own business, but in this middle, we’ve been through several things. Everything we’ve been through was important to shaping the professionals we are today. Freelancing is one of the greatest work experiences you can have, and what we consider the start of your growth as a professional.
Like it was for us, full-time Freelancing is almost a dream for most of the designers. Working for yourself is an incredible experience, but need care. If you build a bad Freelance Career, your dream can become a nightmare and it may destroy your passion. Unfortunately, it’s something that happens a lot. Most freelancers complain about work, deadlines, money, clients… But it doesn’t need to be that way. Going from an employee to a full-time Freelancer, demands time and plan.
Start by overlapping
At first, you should avoid jump right in Freelancing. You’ve probably thought that, to start it, you should quit your job and the world will be responsible for giving you clients and money… NOPE! You need to build your foundation. Most of those who start freelancing are at a day job working full-time. Quitting everything is a bad decision. You need to be prepared for it and you need to be safe.
It’s where you should start to overlap. You need at first to be in a position that your day job can sustain you without problems. The focus needs to be to cover all your bills first. This way, you will be able to focus your freelance work on projects that matter and where you will grow your skills and your presence.
Also, always save money. The beginning of your Freelance career can have lots of ups and downs and you will need to be prepared for it. Here is the formula:
- Use your day job as a foundation so you can work on projects that are good and that help you develop your skills.
- Save money for then next months so you can work with the right mindset.
- Once your freelancing career stabilises you can make the overlap and work entirely for yourself.
You’re much more than you think you are
A good Freelancer is the result of a great mindset. The most important thing I see in successful freelancers is how they treat their work. It’s also the same mistakes why most of the freelancers quit and go back to their 9–5 routine.
You must treat Freelancing as a Business.
That’s the secret. A Freelancer is a solo entrepreneur, as a business running with only one person on it. Once you treat yourself that way, things will change.
As a business, you should learn how to do business. You need to look for how to work, how to promote, how to deal with clients, how to deal with payments, etc. No one told you it would be easy, but the return is totally worth it.
Be visible
If you’ve been in the industry for some years, you probably have projects you’re proud of. Make sure you’re improving it and that people are seeing it. The first step is to build yourself a portfolio. Showcase your best work, present the challenges and solutions you came up with, and always look to improve.
You need to have your own platform where you show your work, but it is also great to share what you’ve done on other platforms (like Dribbble or Behance). You must interact with the people in your industry. The exchange of ideas is always better than keeping them in secret. By interacting, other professionals can be interesting in working on a project with you, and maybe some of your first freelancing work can start from a relationship like that.
As I told you before, treat yourself as a business. You’re a business owner now. One of the keys of a business is marketing, but the traditional marketing is fading away in our time. People resonate with business and brands they can relate with. Showing good work is great, but you should also interact and teach. Teaching is a powerful tool to bring recognition and attention to your business. It can be on blog posts, podcasts, video courses, etc.
What to be prepared for
Expect a great shift in the amount and type of work you’ll be doing. At first, we think that the freelance career will be ourselves doing the things we like to do all day long, being free to work wherever and whenever we want. The truth is that you will be facing different tasks along the day. It relates to meetings, preparing proposals, dealing with payments, answering emails, writing contracts, and also building your online presence.
You need to learn to love that other side too.
I know you love what you’re good at, but you should love business in order to succeed. It can be tough in the beginning because it’s all a new and uncovered world. But don’t be afraid of it. If you learn how to do it, the results will be totally rewarding.
Most of your success will come from the business work of your freelancing. That’s where you show your professionalism and how people will see your brand. If you want to have clients coming up to your door, build a great relationship with the ones you have. No matter if they are big or small.
One satisfied client can lead you to your dream client.
As curious as it can sound, clients don’t value much the output as they value the relationship. Of course, you should always do your best work and improve your output. We told before about Overperforming, working smarter and how to deliver more value, but clients evaluate a lot how a project was managed.
Good communication, professionalism, and transparency is the key for a great relationship.
You must make your clients trust you and believe in your work. This trust can be built in numerous manners, but the way you set expectations, communicate your process and pay attention to your client’s goals, will make them sure of being making a good investment.
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This is a huge topic and there’s a lot more for us to talk about. At first, you need to make that shift, that change of mindset and perception behind Freelancing. Once you develop this new way of thinking you will be able to change and start to build a successful career.
We will be talking more about Freelancing in the future. By that time, stay tuned with our new blog posts and the different topics we cover related to design business and animation.
Originally published at mowestudio.com on January 6, 2016.
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