If you’re feeling that it’s all running away with you, you’re stressed and out of control, then here are six things I would recommend – ideally BEFORE you get to that point!!
1 – Make sure you’re doing something you love! Don’t pick a freelance business for the money you think you’ll be able to make, pick something that floats your boat. Then it will never feel like work, however hard you work! (and you’ll do a better job and make more money in the end too)
2 – Get better at saying “No”. Yes, I know there isn’t much in your diary beyond three months from now, which is a bit scary, but good work WILL come in, you don’t need to take BAD work. Choose work that will enrich your soul, that will make you happy, and that you’ll be good at.
3 – Put your prices up. The point of optimum profit is where you lose HALF your customers on price! And at this point you are doing half the work so you can do a better job for those customers, justifying the higher price. And the half you lose will be the stressful ones – the price-obsessed greedy moaners who don’t understand quality and don’t particularly value you, they just want the cheapest. Out they go! Do some experimental pricing, charging 10% or 20% more on just the occasional jobs and then, when they don’t bat an eyelid, you can discover that you can do this on every customer. And then keep using it till you find the point where they start to drop off.
4 – Delegate the routine admin stuff to a PA or a VA. I have a PA for half a day a week. I hardly ever see her but we meet up occasionally, the rest is by email. She does the invoicing, looks after my diary, books hotels, does some of the accounts, lets customers know I haven’t forgotten their course that’s coming up, scans linkedin for significant messages, etc. This saves me perhaps 10 hours a week, which is 10 weeks a year. Enough for several holidays! It also saves me money when you consider my hourly rate: she’s cheaper than me, AND faster!
5 – Share the load with a group of similar people. Meet every month for a curry and compare notes. Help each other solve problems, generate ideas, make decisions, and hold each other to account next time: did they do what they said they were going to do? Your regular friends don’t understand what it’s like to be self employed, they are no use for this – you need a mastermind group of freelancers like yourself.
6 – Learning: the only thing that matters is what’s in your head, so make sure you know all about sales, negotiating, finance, market trends etc. This will save you time, and save you stress because you know the answers. For example you don’t have to Iive in fear of losing that one big account because you know about selling so you have more customers than you need, you’re not dependent on any one of them, you can lose one and not even care! You don’t dread the situation where a customer asks for a discount because you know about negotiating – you can say if you order twice as much THEN I can give you a discount….
Original article cane be found HERE