The Everyday Entrepreneur Podcast

#10: Could Freelancing Be Right For You?

Episode 10

Episode Summary:

Thinking of starting a freelancing business but you’re not quite sure it’s right for you? On this week’s episode I am covering 6 fundamental questions to ask yourself if you’re considering starting your own freelancing business. I break each question down and why it’s important. After this episode, you’re bound to have a good idea if freelancing could be right for you!

You Don’t Want to Miss…

01:19 – Why the fall is an opportune time to make a big career decision

03:40 – The different types of freelancing options

05:31 – Six questions to ask yourself to determine if freelancing is right for you

15:49 – Other freelancing resources on the blog

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Word-for-Word Episode Transcript:

Hi, I'm Holly Knoll, host of The Everyday Entrepreneur Podcast. If you've always wanted to start a business and don't know where, or how to start, you've come to the right place. After leaving an unfulfilling corporate career, I decided it was time to start a business of my own. Today, I'm a Business Coach and creator of The Consultant Code where I help people start services based businesses in 60 days or less. So grab your latte because you're about to be inspired, armed with knowledge, and given simple tools to start a business of your own from my interviews with everyday entrepreneurs.

Thank you so much for being here today. Today I’m going to run through six questions to help you determine if freelancing could be right for you. These are questions that I have thought long and hard about because they're questions I wish I would have asked myself when I was first starting out, and they're questions that I have learned over time are crucial to helping make the decision on whether or not freelancing is right for you. So let's get right into it.

It's fall here in Minnesota, it's October, 2020, and the leaves are all turning! I am watching them fall to the ground, and I think it's pretty symbolic because trees are shedding their leaves, the leaves are falling into the ground, so that new things can come up in the spring. Well, I know I’m on the verge of sounding a bit cheesy, but bear with me, because I believe that fall is a great time for each of us to look at our lives in a similar way.

What do I mean by that? Well, about five years ago, in October of 2015, I decided to let go of something in my life that was no longer serving me, and that was my career as a corporate employee. I had just been let go of a job, the first time ever in my career, and I was left with two choices, or rather I was grappling with two choices.

One, do I go back to another corporate job, maybe at a sexy company, and do the same thing, just at a different company, and continue to knock my head against the wall.

Or two, do I finally step out and start my own business, which was something I had wanted to do since I graduated college. Well, I'm sitting here with you today so you can guess which one I picked!

But it wasn't necessarily an overnight decision. I definitely did interview with other companies, but nothing felt quite right going back in as an employee. I was burnt out, my definition of success was no longer having a sexy title, maybe a corner office, and a team below me, that just wasn't fulfilling to me. I had just left a job where I'd had that, and quite frankly, it did not make me happy whatsoever, and I think that's obvious looking back, but it wasn't obvious to me when I was in the middle of it.

So if you're grappling with where you want to go next in your career, personally, I think the fall is a great time to think about what could you possibly let go in your career that hasn't been serving you? And where can you go and what can you make space for instead?

So you're probably here today because you are considering a career in freelancing. And let me tell you, there's a few different ways people define freelancing.

A, it doesn't have to be full-time work. You could take on freelancing as a side hustle, in addition to your full-time job, hey, there's something to be said for full benefits being paid for by an employer!

But there's also something to be said for having another income stream that you can be making money from, by leveraging your amazing skills and strengths that you've built throughout the course of your career. So freelancing makes for an incredible side hustle.

If you're considering leaving your corporate job as an employee and transitioning into the life of a freelancer, freelancing can be an incredibly lucrative and freeing career opportunity to also do full-time.

Freelancing is also called a few different things and some of these words are distinctly different, depending on the company, or the type of service you offer. But in a nutshell, these different types of words that are associated with freelancing all do fall under the freelancing umbrella.

You might've heard consulting, contracting, advising, these are all different words that can also be used to describe freelancing work. You are marketing your skills and strengths as a service to a client that will pay for those skills and strengths, which is ultimately a very, very rough and loose definition of freelancing.

Now, back to those six questions, I'm going to weave throughout the six questions a couple of anecdotes around my personal journey through freelancing, and why these are important questions to ask yourself as you get started out.

QUESTION 1: Have you built deep skills in a specific role, function or type of job?

What types of roles or functions or types of jobs am I referring to? There's quite a few out there that make incredibly easy transitions into the world of freelancing.

And I'm just going to name 10 or 12 roles or jobs that are really easy to transition into a world of freelancing:

• software engineering

• website design

• program/project management

• digital producers

• product managers

• attorneys

• accounting

• copywriting

• branding/marketing/creative/art direction

• photography

• user experience

• social media strategy or management

• administrative assistants can transition beautifully into being a virtual assistant,

• nonprofit expertise

• strategic advising

These are just a few, but certainly not limited to types of roles that exist in corporate careers that transition very nicely into being a freelancer.

QUESTION 2: Do you want to handpick your coworkers, AKA your clients?

I coach my clients to put up their velvet rope of exclusivity. This means we don’t work with anyone and everyone because not everyone and anyone is right for our business.

What I mean by the red velvet rope is you get to define who are your dream clients. Who do you want to work with more than anyone, and who makes you come alive when you work with them? What types of people are these?

And put your velvet rope up to only allow those types of people in. Imagine you own an exclusive restaurant, or nightclub, or boutique, and only the people that you adore and love, get to come in. Because as a business owner, you get to choose who you work with.

At the same time, I've certainly not been able to pick every single person I work with as a freelancer when I've worked with big companies, but I have been able to just decide, do I want to work for this client leader? Yes or no?

There's been a couple of times when it's been an absolute no, where I've known it's not a good fit, and I move on and I explore that next consulting or freelancing role. That is what I mean by do you get to handpick your coworkers.

You get to decide who and what roles come through your velvet rope as a freelancer. So you get to decide, who makes you come alive and who you want to work with.

QUESTION 3: Do you want to choose the type of work you do?

As a freelancer, you get to decide exactly what types of services you offer. When I started my freelancing business, I had built a skill within the program management space of technology teams for 15 years in my career, I knew exactly what types of services I would offer as a freelancer.

So as you go back to question one, think about the deep skills that you've built in your role, function or job. How would these skills translate into the services you would provide as a freelancer?

If you met your dream client, somebody you want to let behind that velvet rope, and they ask you, "What do you do?"

You get to choose how you answer that question because you get to choose the type of work that you do.

QUESTION 4: Do you want to choose how much money you'll make?

Yes, you get to choose, as a freelancer, what you charge. That's great! Now, I'm not necessarily saying that successful freelancers charge millions of dollars an hour (some probably do?).

A deciding point for me was when I was like, "Wouldn't it be great to decide for myself how much money I make?”

Year after year, working in corporate jobs often I got the standard 2%, 3%, standard- of-living raise because the company performance wasn't great, or the economy wasn't great, or whatever factors that were that year determined how much I made.

I found it really freeing and exciting to do the market research, to understand what other freelancers who are doing similar work to me were doing.

And after doing the math, and figuring out how much I would make a year, that was significantly more than what I was making in my corporate job.

And it was probably even more than what my boss was making at that time. So that was really exciting. And it still is, I still find one of my favorite parts about being a freelancer is doing the math, figuring out what I want to charge for certain projects, getting into the contract, nailing out all those details, and just putting that stake in the ground around what I am going to get in return of providing my services and skills.

It's that balance of, I get to provide something that I know I'm really good at, and then knowing that you're being reciprocated with pay that accurately reflects how good you are at your job, there's something really freeing and exciting about that, because you know you're getting paid for what you're worth.

QUESTION 5: Are you interested in focusing on your strengths versus fixing your weaknesses?

You're seeing a theme, there's a lot of choice that you get as a freelancer. Do you want to choose to focus on your strengths? And if that's important to you, freelancing could be right for you.

I have been in roles where I've had leaders or bosses that have been fixated on me fixing what I'm not so great at.

And while I wholeheartedly believe it's important to be open to feedback, and it's important to be growing as a person and personally evolving and maturing certain skills, it's also, if not more important, to be focusing on sharpening your strengths and be building a career around what you're really good at.

So as a freelancer, you get to decide what services you offer, hopefully those are services that play entirely to your strengths, and you get to focus on just doing your strengths versus trying to fix what you're not great at.

As a business owner, I don't really try to fix what I'm not good at anymore, I hire people to do that work for me.

So think about that, as you're honing in on your strengths, and you're thinking about what you're good at, focus in your sweet spot all of the time.

QUESTION 6: Would you rather never have an annual review again?

Again, I have nothing against growing and recognizing feedback, taking it seriously, and acting on it.

However, I do have something against annual reviews that are completely focused on everything you did wrong and over a course of a year, and I've seen this happen too many times to my friends, my colleagues, myself, where the annual review process is just so defeating.

If you're tired of having an annual review where you just get okay results, when you know you kicked butt, but your manager's like, "Yeah, you met our expectations." Where you know you kicked butt, but you get what you think is just an average review, exit stage left, be done with that.

As a freelancer, your annual review is whether or not your clients want to continue working with you, whether or not they give you more work to do, whether or not they extend your contract, whether or not they refer you to other people, that my friends is your annual review, and it's not even on an annual basis, this is just keeping your business alive.

So if your clients love you and want to continue working with you, and you do with them, to me I would take that any day over someone else's thoughts and opinions written down on a piece of paper that I have to sign, even if I don't agree.

Okay, so if you'd rather never have an annual review again, or if you just even want to take a break from an annual review and try freelancing, hey, you can always go back to those annual reviews if you miss them.

And I'd love to know if you'd ever do because five years in, I haven't missed an annual review, I haven't missed having those for one second.

This is my perspective, and my take, and by no means are these blanket statements of right or wrong. I invite you to bring into your experiences as you go through each of these questions. Some of these questions, you may have a strong yes, a strong no, or you may feel neutral. This isn't a binary process, but rather this is a process to just get you a little bit closer to helping you figure out where could you go next in your career?

What can you let go of in your career?

And what can you let go of in order to invite more space in?

Whether it's a side hustle, whether it's going full-time as a freelancer, or, realizing, freelancing might not be for me at this time, or ever, totally fine!

At least you are asking yourself the right questions.

And now my friends, you have six questions to help you assess whether freelancing could be right for you.

I also have a blog post over on hollyknoll.com/blog/consult, where you can go through a series of 20 questions on whether or not freelancing is right for you.

Also, be sure to visit hollyknoll.com/free, if you have ever thought about starting a business, whether it's freelancing or any other services based business.

My free Business Action Guide will help you hone in on your business idea in six steps. Download the guide, complete the six simple steps, and I promise you, you will have a much more clear idea of what business you could start than you did before you downloaded the guide.

And then let me know how it went. Did it work for you? What business are you thinking of starting? I would love to know.

You can find me on social media on Instagram @hollyknoll, you can send me an email at holly@hollyknoll.com, or you can shoot me a message on LinkedIn .

Thank you so much for being here today, if you enjoyed The Everyday Entrepreneur Podcast, I would be honored if you go to iTunes and write a review, let us know how we're doing.

Finally, thank you so much for being here today for this podcast episode, I will see you next time right here on The Everyday Entrepreneur Podcast!

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