What you're going to get in this series

Podcast #1: What you’re going to get in this series

February 5th, 2008 · by Andy White · No Comments

Andy White and Darren Fell set out the aims and upcoming topics in Freelance Advisor podcast series.

TRANSCRIPT:

AW: Welcome. I’m with Darren Fell and we’re going to be talking about plans for the Podcast but there’s a bit of a back story isn’t there Darren

DF: There certainly is Andy. This goes back a little way. This goes back to 2001 when I set up Pure the E-mail marketing company, Pure 360.com, and 7yrs of very very hard work, building that up and building up a big client base of about 750, 800 people and then getting to a point last summer and thinking what shall I do? Shall I carry on building up Pure or shall I go and do something entrepreneurial? Two partners approached me with an idea for an on-line accounting system specifically for freelancers and contractors and I thought “what the hell” I’m going to go and do it but I’m going to give up all the operational headaches of e-mail marketing and a big team and go and do this in a brand new world of freelancers and contractors so that is exactly what I chose to do. Now I’m starting up the business and it is called Crunch.co.uk and we’re going to launch probably the summer of 2008.

I have become a freelancer myself to my own business and I’ve realised the pains involved in being a freelancer. Things I didn’t know about. Should I be a limited company? Should I be VAT registered? What insurance do I need? What happens if the Inland Revenue come after me for an IR35 claim? So me being me, I wanted to write about it. Get it down on paper and I thought I’ll share it with everybody. So I was looking around for a name for a site to help other freelancers and I’d spoken to a number of other freelancers here in Brighton, at Brighton Farm, Paul Silver and they all think it’s a fantastic idea so let’s put together a site so that other freelancers and contractors start up in this brand new world of freedom, advise them exactly what to do and provide ongoing advice. So how do we propose to do that? We propose to do that with Blogs. Every time I learn something new I’ll get writing, I’ll get other freelancers and contractors who have been doing it far longer than I have to write down all their tips and hints and we thought we’d involve you Mr White and start pod casting and there’s nothing better than interviewing all these freelancers and contractors that we keep bumping into clearly with a hell of a lot more experience than I have. How do they do it? The ideas are the next three podcasts to do three things you must do to prepare to be a freelancer or contractor. The five marketing secrets of contractors or freelancers and the most common pitfalls and how you overcome them. I think this is going to be a lot of fun.

AW: Now the good thing about your situation Darren is that because of what you are doing, setting up Crunch you are surrounded by contractors and freelancers and of course most of the clients, well probably all of the clients, in theory, will be contractors and freelancers so we have a wonderful resource, do we not, of people that we can talk to and experience we can plug into.

DF: We certainly do. Every fellow that actually speaks to me they always come out with a bit of wisdom that I didn’t know about so I said would you mind writing a little ditty or putting a blog together.

In fact, would you mind being interviewed by yourself and get on the podcast so yeh it’s absolutely brilliant being surrounded by that. In fact, tonight I’m going down to the Brighton Farm to talk to a load more contractors and freelancers about all their pains and how they market themselves, how do they keep getting business, how do they invoice, what accountancy hell have they been through, have the Inland Revenue been after them, have they missed a VAT payment and been charged some horrendous HMRC percentage of the VAT owed? So yeh that’s what I’m aiming to do and I think that the more we surround ourselves with contractors and freelancers the more information we are going to have on Freelanceadvisor.co.uk

AW: Now let’s also tell the listeners about Feedback and asking some questions because we want to encourage the listeners to ask some questions do we not Darren?

DF: We certainly do because rather usefully people feeding back on these podcasts enables us to actually create more content and there’s far more useful content out there so anybody listening to this needs to get on the e-mail feedback@freelanceadvisor.co.uk and I’ll be able to come back to you. If you’ve got questions put them to me. I’m surrounded by a whole host of very very useful people, number 1 is an accountant whose been a trained accountant and taxation specialist for countless years, Steve Crouch, and he owns an accountancy firm, SRC, here in Brighton, and Crunch plugs into that so any accountancy questions you’ve got like how do I do this, how do I actually make my contract IR35 compliant? Buzz them to me and I’ll do my very best to get back to you with all the responses and it should prove to be a very fantastic exercise in gathering material to create podcast after podcast and create a really really good series.

AW: So you want to encourage people to ask questions and there are probably loads of questions especially if you are just starting up in contracting. So it’s feedback@freelanceadvisor.co.uk. Darren, you wanted to say something else.

DF: Yeh I wanted to say that we keep faltering on the actual name is it freelanceadvisor because we actually came up with a previous name which was something like freelanceadvicefactory.co.uk and basically the URL disappeared of the end of the browser on the right hand side of the screen….

AW: It also sounds a bit like a pizza parlour doesn’t it?

DF: yes (laughs) it just didn’t sound quite right so it was only a few days ago that I thought “wait a minute” freelanceadvisor is a much better name and, low and behold, it was actually free as a domain so I grabbed it and Andy’s already put the site up there and this is the first podcast for it so it’s brilliant. I was going to say we can say it more succinctly but we can’t at the moment but it’s a name that hopefully will get around the freelancer and contractor circles.

AW: Ok so the former of these podcasts is we have already, have we not, interviewed, well I’ve already interviewed one or two people and usually we will have an interview with an active successful contractor or freelancer and on most episodes I will be with Darren and we shall talk about what we have listened to but also we will get other experts talking about other aspects of freelancing and contracting, how to get started and all the other various things that you need to know about so we’re looking forward to it. It’s going to be a great resource I think. Darren any final words from you?

DF: I think you’re right. It’s going to be lots and lots of fun. I just love the idea of getting out and talking to the freelancers and contractors and learning more and getting it down on the site so it makes people’s lives far easier because once you start thinking about leaving that corporate world, and leaving the institution as I would call it, and going out on your own, you start realising that there’s a whole lot of things to learn so we’re going to get this site together and I hope it’s going to be useful. If it’s not and we get things wrong, then just come back to feedback@freelanceadvisor.co.uk and tell us that we are a bunch of idiots and it actually isn’t 44p a mile it’s 46p a mile or something like that but we will try our very very best to get accurate information on the podcast for you.

AW: Look forward to it. Darren Fell thank you very much indeed.

DF: Thank you Andy.

Thank you for listening to Freelanceadvisor. Please send questions and comments to feedback@freelanceadvisor.co.uk. Please note that everyone’s situation is different Freelanceadvisor is intended only as general guidance. Please consult a relevant professional before acting on any advice from the freelanceadvisor podcast or website.

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