Daryl Close, our small business and entrepreneurial performance coach, discusses the preparation you must undertake from both a strategic and mental perspective to establish a successful freelancing practice.
What do you need to do in order to establish a successful freelancing practice?
Freelancing is not for the faint of heart. It is easy to say you want to go freelance and work for yourself until of course you are facing the first day on your own. There is no guaranteed income, no one providing you with work and no career path… unless you take care of those things yourself. Like any small business it is easy to fail at freelancing simply due to lack of preparation and I’m here to help you move past those initial hurdles.
‘You Ltd’…you’re now a business
You first have to recognize that you are no longer working as an individual; rather you are working as a business. That means you have to manage yourself as such and critical areas such as cash flow, expenses, marketing, networking, branding and time management cannot be ignored. Indeed your success in managing these will go a long way to determining your success. The key aspects are to know your target market and to conservatively estimate income and expenses for two years in advance. It is also critical that you market your services and it would be wise to inform your network of your intentions at least a few months in advance.
From a social networking perspective do not be scared of online networking and ensure your business is setup on key sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and even Twitter where the numbers of users is increasing at an exponential rate. Also a must is that you have an effective time management system in place. If you use a Blackberry I suggest looking at REXwireless which is a great add-on application.
A business with no heart or with resilience is not a business that will succeed
Moving past the business strategy and financial management that is part of being a freelancer it is also imperative that you recognise that it takes more than good time management to be successful. However rewarding freelancing can be it is also extremely challenging and you have to ensure that you believe in your heart that you can succeed. Furthermore you have to have strong enough resilience to be able to come back from the rejections and failures you encounter. Being an Australian, I will refer to the recent experiences faced by the Australian cricket team. Beaten at home by South Africa and New Zealand and facing multiple retirements, the Australian team was facing a crisis and a huge lack of confidence. The tour of South Africa could have easily turned into a disaster but they demonstrated both the heart and mental resilience to not only win the series, but to do so convincingly, and retain their number one position.
The current economic environment is extremely challenging and you cannot believe otherwise. However, if you plan accordingly, are open to learning from your mistakes and demonstrate perseverance you will have every chance of creating and sustaining a successful freelancing practice.
By Daryl Close, business performance consultant & coach
Image by Robert/Says/Hi
