Strategies to Create a Successful Freelance Business

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Virtuali

5 min readJun 4, 2023

Build a Shopping Mall to Avoid the Roller Coaster

Is your freelance income on a feast or famine model? Then you need to build a shopping mall to avoid the roller coaster. The best freelancing advice I’ve ever received

This is Lesson 8 in a series. A list of all topics in the series is at the end of this article.

Welcome back to my series of lessons learned from 15 years of running a freelance business. I founded my company, Seven Oaks Consulting, in 2007, offering marketing and writing services worldwide from my home office in Virginia. Since then, we’ve grown into a network of people working entirely remotely, providing excellent content marketing support to companies ranging from startups to growing tech firms.

During this decade and a half of freelancing, I’ve learned quite a few things — the importance of keeping good records, of personal branding, and of finding a micro niche. But among these lessons, one of the most important is to “build a shopping mall to avoid the roller coaster.”

What in the world does this mean?

Stick with me here. This is one lesson you won’t want to miss if you’re a freelancer.

The Financial Roller Coaster

If you charted your business income on a monthly basis, I can almost guarantee you it would look like this:

An example of “roller coaster” income — a typical year for a freelancer!

We often suffer from a feast or famine situation; either we’ve got so much work coming in we’re up until midnight writing away, or we’re wondering how we’re going to meet next month’s rent.

This feast and famine situation leads to the roller-coaster graph. The peaks represent times of abundant work or lucrative pay, while the dips represent times of hardship.

Most freelancers go through these cycles, but some never get out of it. They get stuck chasing job after job, landing a lucrative but short-term gig, or they fail to develop a micro niche or personal brand. It becomes increasingly difficult to land gigs without a clearly identified niche or personal brand; thus, the feast and famine cycle — the financial roller coaster — continues.

Enter the Shopping Mall Model of Freelancing

Now, look at this diagram of the traditional, old-fashioned shopping mall.

A typical American shopping mall includes two or more large “anchor” stores at each end. These are usually department stores that take up significant square footage in the mall. Along the mall’s corridors are various shops, often local versions of chain stores. And in the center of the mall, small pops or kiosks.

For freelancers, the shopping mall is the ultimate model of what our ideal client base should look like.

Graphic by Jeanne Grunert. Shopping mall freelance income model shared with me by Janet Wikler and used with permission.

Anchor clients are those with whom we have developed long-term relationships. The result is usually a monthly retainer or regularly occurring billable work that provides steady work for a steady income.

Independent stores along the mall corridors represent large, short-term projects. For writers, this may be a web writing project, a book contract, or a large marketing brochure to write. The project takes up significant time and offers considerable remuneration but is not likely to lead to long-term or steady work.

Lastly, the little pop-up stores in the middle of the mall — the jewelry place, the candle shop, the quick gift shop — are like small, one-off projects that pop up occasionally. They provide some income, and it’s nice to have it, but it’s not a regular source of income.

What does your unique “shopping mall” look like?

If your freelance roster contains more one-off projects than regularly occurring work, then your ‘shopping mall’ is uneven. It’s more like a strip mall or a flea market than a mall, and the end result is the roller coaster graph.

You need to build the shopping mall to get off the financial roller coaster.

Finding Anchor Clients Is the Key to Smoothing the Income Curve

Finding and retaining long-term clients is the key to hopping off the roller coaster and securing a regular freelance income. These so-called anchor clients often have work that needs to be completed monthly but do not have the staff resources to do it.

You may find such clients from smaller gigs if you are lucky. We have secured many long-term clients by providing exceptional work on smaller projects. Clients often struggle to find reliable freelance services. By proving, time and time again, that you can deliver projects on time and on budget, in the quantity and quality desired by the client, you’ll develop the reputation of a dependable resource and one who is worthy of monthly long-term assignments.

Not every writer, graphic artist, or freelancer needs or wants long-term clients, and that’s okay. But if you are sick of the roller coaster finances and chasing the next project down, then getting off the coaster and into the mall is essential. Finding good clients, and treating them like the gems they are, will help you develop relationships that ensure long-term clients and the reliable, steady freelance income that follows.