Introduction to Business as a Freelancer

So you’re thinking of becoming a freelancer. You’re done building someone else’s business, making them successful. It’s your time now.

You want financial freedom and to pick when you work. Maybe you’re worried you might fail in Business as a Freelancer, afraid that there’s not enough money in freelancing, and that you might have to move back into your mom’s house.

10 Steps to Start Freelancing Today

So let’s get into it. If I had to start again Business as a Freelancer today, these are the 10 steps that I would follow. And at the end of the blog, I’m going to show you five ways to land your dream client.

The Alternative to Freelancing

Freelancing takes work, but the alternative is staying in a job you don’t like with no flexibility, capped earnings, and letting your dreams go to die. I don’t want that for you, and I don’t think you want that either. Plus, you don’t want to miss out on this.

Solve a Problem

First things first: solve a problem. Freelancing is about solving problems. Think about what kind of problems you want to solve specifically. So here are some common business or people problems:

Common Business Problems

• Time: People don’t have enough hours in the day to market their business, create content, or grow their brand. Your work helps them save time by providing done-for-you solutions.
• Money: Many businesses struggle with sales, cash flow, or just running out of money in general. You help them generate revenue through better marketing, positioning, and creative strategies.
• Fulfillment: People want to feel successful, happy, and inspired. You can do this by making them look better to others or by just creating a positive experience for them.

Leveling Up in Freelancing

Do you ever feel like life is kind of like a video game? You have to keep fighting those many bosses in your life until you level up and become strong enough to defeat the next boss and the next one until you’re like level 100 and you become unstoppable. Well, in freelancing, your first giant to overcome is making your first $100, then your first thousand, and then your first $10,000, and so on.

Choose a Business Structure

Two: choose a killer business structure. So you have two paths you can go down. You can be a freelancer and do all of the work yourself, or you can have a freelancing company where you basically hire out contractors and take a percent of what they do. Both are good models.

One is where you’re doing all the work, and the other is where other people are doing all the work. So you don’t really need to have the knowledge or know-how or skills.

Personally, I kind of like a combination of both because I like to be knowledgeable about the services that I’m offering, but then once I figure it out, I can just pass it on to a contractor. So I like a little bit of both models.

Understand Your Audience and Industry

Three: dive deep into understanding your audience and your industry. Research your market. Who are they? What do they need? And does your service solve a legitimate problem for people? Are they spending money on it already? And if so, how much money are they spending?

So to be honest, my favorite tools for market research are Frederick AI, which is a phenomenal tool—I honestly use it all the time and Chat-PT. But most of all, I actually join groups in my industry of people already succeeding in my field. You would be surprised at how willing people are to share their financial wins, losses, and their general insights. It is a huge hack.

Design Your Dream Business

Four: designing your dream business. So you have three main goals when it comes to building your freelance company. You need to get clients, get your clients results, and retain your clients. The goal is to ideally land recurring clients and keep them renewing your contracts. This is going to create security for you and your team. Make a business plan.

Spend some time thinking about your overall vision. How much do you want to make, and what do you need to do to get it? For example, if your goal is $10,000 a month, you either need two $5,000 clients, five $2,000 clients, or 10 $1,000 clients. So write out a rough business plan: your projected expenses, the cost of hiring out your freelancers or using tools for example, and then add in your quarterly and monthly milestones.

And this next part is really important: make sure to write your daily action plan for success. It’s important to be realistic. It honestly does not need to be perfect. You can just make changes as you go. The purpose of a business plan is just to create a rough outline or path, but as you take action, things might change, and this is totally okay. You can honestly just make changes to the plan as you go and find better alternative pathways.

Build Trust with Good Branding

Five: get people to trust you and give you their money by using good branding. I feel like branding can seem very scary, but it doesn’t have to be. As a freelancer, you and your work are the brand. I recently talked to a branding coach, and they said that everybody you know already has a personal brand. It’s the things you associate them with.

It could be their personality, their hair, their temperament, their interests, or even just things that they like. You also already have a personal brand. You just have to learn how to share it online. And yes, you can choose certain aesthetics and colors and beautiful pictures. But what is most important is to share who you are, what you do, who you do it for, and why you do it. The why could be: we create one-of-a-kind website experiences so you can turn your followers into paying customers. Focus on how you’re helping people. I want you to ask yourself this question: What is your competitive advantage?

Every person has one. For example, maybe you have a lot of time, and you can help business owners who have no time. Maybe you’re good at researching or learning. Or maybe your pricing is affordable. Your competitive advantage is likely tied to your interests or your passions. I have like a million interests.

I’ve tried painting, denim clothing, modeling, dancing, reselling furniture—like every entrepreneurial endeavor. And at first, it stressed me out ‘cuz I thought I needed to do one thing. It’s actually led to my competitive advantage because now I’m able to speak on a wide range of topics. Your interest will become your competitive advantage.

Building a Portfolio

Building a portfolio: A big part of your branding is the work that you have to show for yourself. You want to do as much work as you can in your field so you can show potential clients all that you can do. So take on free or cheap work until you have a strong portfolio that you can show your clients. One of the biggest branding strategies is giving away free things like strategy calls, courses, guides, or just free content.

This way you can gain testimonials, and people will start to see you as an expert in your field. Okay, I have a riddle for you. I’m the boundary setter, the written line. Break me, and the power is mine. What am I? The answer is a contract, which leads me to my next point.

Protect Yourself Legally

Six: you need to protect yourself legally. As a freelancer or freelance company, you will need contracts. My dad always taught me to look over my contracts thoroughly. You never know what could be in there. I actually prefer to make my own contracts, and I typically get clients to pay 50% upfront and 50% after completion.

Sometimes I even get 100% upfront. You have to make sure you’re getting paid. A good tool for this is called Jurro. It’s a contract automation software. So it can make contracts for you, adjust them, and you can sign them there. Another great platform is called DockHub. It’s a place to manage and organize your contracts all in one place. Here are some really important things to pay attention to in your contracts: payment terms, timeline, and usage terms, revisions and edits, intellectual property rights.

So you want to clarify who owns the project after completion, termination, and non-compete or exclusivity clauses. If you aren’t sure whether something in a contract looks good or not, it’s best to consult with a lawyer. However, there’s a little hack. You can use ChatPT and give it the prompt, “You’re my lawyer. Help me understand this contract.” Give it the contract, and it’s going to help you understand what all the legal jargon means.

Let’s talk a little bit about legal business structures. As a freelancer, you can just be a sole proprietor, but if you start a freelancing business and you start to scale, it may benefit you to run a limited liability corporation. This way, you’re protected by your business from any lawsuits or debts. You will also get a lot of other benefits from starting one. So if you want to, just go to your government website to set one up.

Create a Sustainable Pricing Strategy

Seven: create a sustainable pricing strategy. How much should you charge for your services? If you’re just starting out, it’s good to offer lower rates to build your portfolio. Once you’re established, increase your pricing and offer tiered packages. For example, you could have a $1,000, $3,000, or $5,000 a month package. Research industry rates or ask ChatPT and aim for 3 to 6-month commitments from clients to lock in long-term success. I tried to rely on one-off gigs for a while, and this caused me so much stress and sleepless nights.

As a freelancer, you need to create peace for yourself, and a good way to do this is through recurring revenue. I also wouldn’t recommend pricing yourself hourly. This kind of means you just have another job without any security. I did this for a while, and it took all of my time.

So it’s best to charge clients based on the value you bring them. And you have to be confident in the value you bring. Again, joining a community in your niche is going to help you understand the value in your specific industry and find as many ways as you can to communicate the value you bring past the initial service.

When it comes to pricing, you want to have a healthy profit margin, and the typical freelance profit margin is about 40 to 70%. So aim as high as you can while still feeling confident that your price is fair for your customer.

Attract Your Dream Clients

Here are five methods that you can use to attract your dream clients. You need to set up a funnel. In simple terms, a funnel is a step-by-step process where a business attracts people, gives them the info they need, builds trust, and then encourages them to buy or sign up for something by the end. Now here are the five methods to attract those dream clients of yours:

Cold Outreach

One: cold outreach—emailing and calling people and businesses. You can use LinkedIn, Apollo, or Hunter.io for finding leads. Then use social media platforms to message and get a first point of contact. Then you can use Instantly AI to send out automated emails, or you can hire someone on Fiverr to do it for you. Next, use Monday CRM to track your leads.

Inbound Marketing

Two: inbound marketing. Create organic content that attracts clients to you. You can use Later to schedule posts, CapCut or InShot to edit your videos, you can use TypeForm for forms, and you can use ManyChat to automate your DMs. Looms is great for tutorials, and Zoom or Google Meet for your strategy calls once you book clients. One of the best strategies with this one is posting a free lead magnet such as a guide or course where clients have to give you their email to get it.

Lead Generation and Paid Ads

Three: lead generation and paid ads. You can use LinkedIn, Facebook, or Google to run ads for your business. And the best platform for you will depend on your target demographic. I actually have a video on Facebook ads, and I’ve linked it down below if you want to learn more. Next, you can use Shopify Email or Mailchimp for email marketing and newsletters.

Joint Ventures or Partnerships

Four: joint ventures or partnerships. Partner with people who already have access and work with your ideal clients. Or partner with referrals who will sell for you and make a percent of the sales. This is a great shortcut to gaining clients. Think of people in your immediate network, or use platforms like WellFound, LinkedIn, and other networks to find startup founders in your niche. You can also go to networking events to find aligned people. Which leads me to my next tactic.

Associations and Speaking Events

Five: associations and speaking events. Go to events and network with people or present yourself as the expert and teach. Add value to your ideal clients while you’re there. For this, you can use websites such as Eventbrite, and you can use SpeakerHub for speaking engagements, or you can join a speaker guild or association in your area.

A little bonus method, which is actually one of my favorites: platforms. Do not underestimate platforms. I have landed a huge volume of deals through niche platforms where people are already looking for my skills. These are warm leads, meaning they’re looking for your services already. So just Google platforms in your niche to find them.

Upwork and Fiverr are places to find all kinds of clients, but platforms like #paid are great to find brand deals, or YouTube Jobs to find YouTube gigs. The more niche the platform, the better. Just run with one of these methods to start, and then become a master at it.

Once you master one, you can move on to the next one. With all of these methods, you will likely need to schedule discovery calls with your ideal clients. So it’s super important to have a booking link. You can use an app called Calendly for this, or if you use Shopify, you can actually just download an appointment booking app on your store, such as BTA or Easy Appointment Booking. And then you can just do your calls on Google Meet or Zoom.

Hire Out Where Needed

Hire out where it is needed. You want to start hiring freelancers and employees when you have enough extra revenue after covering your bills and putting aside the money you need.

For each business, it’s going to be different whether you need monthly contractors or just people for short-term projects. So you’re going to want to create standard operating procedures so that people know how to take over your projects and do things the right way.

It’s important to be intentional about the kind of culture and communication that you want to have with your team. And it’s best to think of this before you start hiring or contracting people out.

Create a Healthy Money Management System

Create a healthy money management system. Guys, do not be afraid to invest in yourself. It is the best investment you will ever make. Invest in your knowledge, your skills, and your network. Buy that ticket to the event. Purchase that book or course. Just do it. It’ll absolutely be worth it.

When it comes to managing your dough, aka your money, a good app is QuickBooks. It’s easy to track your expenses, and you can also take photos of your receipts for taxes. It’s also good practice to make a spreadsheet of all the money coming in and out of your account and keep track of clients that need to pay you. You don’t want to lose track of who owes you what. Google Sheets is a great platform for this. Also, if you have international clients, it can be useful to use apps like PayPal to receive money, but do know they’re going to take a percentage of your earnings.

Tracking Expenses and Tax Preparation

Guys, one of the best things about freelancing is that you can write off a ton of expenses: your phone, your rent, your equipment, your contractors. So make sure to track all your monthly expenses.

Reinvesting in Your Business

How much should you reinvest back into your business? If you can, it can be great to invest about 20 to 50% back in. You will have to invest a higher percent early on to build. The thing is, with freelancing, you might have really good months and really bad months. So it’s really important to put money aside just in case.

Dealing with Rejection

I will say the number one challenge with being a freelancer is that you will likely have to deal with a lot of rejection. Business is just a numbers game. When you get a rejection, it has nothing to do with you, just your processes. Rather than taking it personally, always ask yourself, “What do I need to do to get a yes next time?” And just so you guys know, the average conversion rate for cold outreach is 1 to 5%. So do not beat yourself up if you get 99% rejections. You only need that 1% to succeed.