People often start out in business on a freelance basis where
they sell their time to different companies. You might be
a freelance web designer, who takes on different contracts
throughout the year, or you might be a personal trainer who
has a number of different clients each day. Whatever your company, I'm here to help you get what you want from your business.
There are some good things about this freelance lark…you're
often in control of your own time, you don't have to be accountable
to anyone else for how you do things and often you can work
from home, keeping your overheads down.
What about the downside of being a freelancer?
But there are some negative points as well. Let's see if any
of these are familiar to you…
- Always having to worry about having enough work, even
when there is plenty of work
- Not being able to pitch for the big jobs, because you
just don't have the capacity
- Not being able to charge the best rates because people
always perceive you as small fry.
- You don't take holidays because you if you do, you
won't get paid.
The big downside to the freelancer model is that you're always
just selling your time. There's an inbuilt limit to how much
you can make because there are only so many hours in a day.
And even if you work for 30 years, it's unlikely that you'll
have built up enough to sell the business on - because you are the business.
So what are your options?
You can carry on freelancing and just build up a good reputation and client base to make sure that there's enough money coming
in to pay the bills and to pay into a pension fund to support
you when you don't want to work so much anymore. There's nothing
at all wrong with doing that, especially if you can keep
developing what you're doing to keep ahead of the competition.
You could start to build up the business a bit more, so
that you don't have to provide all of the services all of
the time. It might be that you start to use other freelancers
to pass work to, and charging a little on top to cover your
time in managing the jobs. You might decide to get a part
time administrator or bookkeeper to do some of the jobs
that you don't like doing.
What about making it a grown up business?
If you want to make some real money, or have a business that
you can sell on to others, you have to work at making yourself
redundant from the business. You have to build up a business
that doesn't rely on you being there, and certainly doesn't
need you to be providing all of the services.
This means getting other people in (either as employees
or associates) who can do the work. Maybe getting some people
who can do the work to a higher standard than you can. It
means changing the way that you see the business, so that
you become the person who is responsible for bringing in
the work, checking that it's done properly, liaising with
clients and making sure that the company turns a tidy profit.
It means that instead of you being your own employee, you
need to start being the Managing Director, the Marketing Manager
and the person in charge of Quality Assurance. This is the
idea that Michael Gerber talks about in his book, The E-Myth
Revisited.
What's stopping you
I regularly work with people who are taking this step,
and are building up a company that won't be dependent on
how many hours they can bill for, and that could be worth
some serious money in the future.
The biggest obstacle for anyone in this situation is being
able to take your business seriously, and to work on taking
yourself out of the equation. This means being able to free
up time from doing the work so that you can spend some time
marketing the company.
It means taking yourself seriously so that you present the
business as a grown up company and pricing yourself at a proper
rate.
If this article has struck a chord, get
in touch for a chat about what you can do to develop a
grown up business.
Julia Chanteray
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