It’s 2022 and we are all used to remote work for the reason we all know too well by now. The Great Resignation got so many people wondering whether or not they should quit their day jobs and go solo. Many did. Many didn’t. And a huge bunch of folks is considering it right now!
Here are my two coconuts on what chances you have as a young professional or a seasoned expert going solo this year, because, I think, the case is entirely different for several parts.
And now you can try to do everything online remotely. You, therefore, have a choice to make regarding the mode: try to build your clientele to either online or offline… and both require a very different approach.
And the combination of your background and the mode play a critical role in getting the start point right.
Let’s go through the cases of how you might want to start a freelance business in 2022. Below are some pathways for you to take depending on your career stage and mode.
What is common
There are a lot of common points to consider when starting your first business… because that’s what doing freelance is: you are your own marketing team, sales team, operations manager, worker, bookkeeper, accountant, and customer service representative.
The greatest mistake (which I also, at least partially, did) in starting a freelance business is that you focus on your first client and get satisfied with executing your first project. Before that, of course, you should get that first client.
Many get cozy in the phase where you have something going that brings some cash. Having the most profitable freelance business can do that at first, even if it is merely an illusion. What most don’t get is the growth vector, i.e. the speed of getting new good clients and what they pay.
Most starting freelancers chase stability of income first, but I argue that stability is a false aim. The moment your business has fired up, you should be taking conscious actions for improving the value of your work. This principle has nothing to do with one’s career stage or whether or not the work is done online or offline.
That is because in the core of a freelance business, a business of one, is your expertise – regardless of the extent of the expertise.
I give you a simple example.
Recently, I got in contact with (well, technically, he was just spamming me like crazy) a young individual claiming to be a “digital marketing expert” who attempted to sell his services to me on LinkedIn… by pushing text messages at my face. What looked hilariously amateurish was:
- His private message was a list of services with the most cliché expressions you could ever see
- He started copy-pasting that same message to my posts
- His profile text included that same copy-pasted list of services
Repetition three times without even attempting to build a genuine connection or probing for problems I as his potential client might have. It was as if he was just randomly spamming with the most ridiculous mindset I’ve ever heard (this came from some other guy once): “Everyone is a potential client for me.”
Great marketing, right? 🙂 No targets, no message, no nothing.
So, let it be perfectly clear that without having a skill that is proven in your industry, you cannot offer anyone that skill as your freelance service.
In the above case, anyone seeing this wannabe marketer will turn away because of the obvious lack of marketing skills. It just won’t fly. Or even crawl forward with a speed of a snail. Just no.
So, build a business around your unique set of skills you have gained so far, even if it is something a fresh grad just picked up in school or if it is something acquired over 20 years of constant learning at work. A number of things are the same. Many of these 9 hacks apply to young professionals and seasoned experts alike when starting up as a freelancer.
The usual starting point: Use your connections to start offline
I suppose the most traditional way to start freelancing is the way I started too: pull some strings and go do projects for the people you already know such as ex-employees, ex-colleagues, ex-student buddies, other old connections… i.e. people you already have a good professional relationship with. People you do not need great sales skills for selling your service to.
It’s a practical way to go! Also, it might be the easiest way to get something going in the initial phase of your freelance business.
Regardless of what your career stage is, you should know the basics about doing business offline in your hometown or region. Your market size depends on your location and/or the number of people you have worked with. Living in a big city gives you a lot more opportunities than staying in a small town.
That local market more or less defines the pay scale too as your income depends on the value chain of the local businesses.
But then, there are a couple of things to note regarding the career stage.
Starting offline as a young professional
As a young professional, you might not have many options in your local space as you do not yet have a massive career that enabled you to work with hundreds of people. Perhaps it is the lack of knowledge of the industry and the value chains in it that most people have no clue about.
The only thing offline you could ever get as a complete fresher is the type of work nobody else wants to do… either because of the content or because of the (low) pay scale. And when the business environment is your local circles, without having a great plan how to create a great reputation fast, it will pay peanuts at best.
Forget going for coconuts! It’s the peanut game you are bound to play in the beginning.
The other important factor is learning and growing your personal competence. Because of not being employed by anyone, there is no employer in the picture who would care about your professional growth. And especially invest in it.
There is nobody else than you who has a long-term aim of turning the newbie you into a competent professional you. The learning process is paid for by yourself. It’s a lot of learning at one time when you also try to learn how to become a business on your own.
Instead of going freelance straight away before having any industry experience, it might be worthwhile to do an internship or two in local companies to get an idea of how people do their jobs. At least you should be able to distinguish what the results of good work versus bad work look like and get an idea about good industry standards of normal work processes.
But not all is lost if you don’t find going online feasible for you at an early career stage!
It is quite possible to utilize your family connections to start doing bits and pieces of assistive work for someone who is running a business. Not only would you get some skills and experience, but you might see something about the business-running side of things at the same time. You could then grow that experience into a freelance business of your own that runs in the local circles.
Alternatively, you could try to harness some industry trends and build a generalist profile and become good at networking and sales very quickly, because that is the way you can impress local businesses even at a young age. Your great attitude would be the best business card.
Starting offline as a seasoned expert
This is your strong point! A big chunk of people who you have already worked with and who know your skillset is your initial clientele. You going solo should not be a big step in the eyes of those who might hire you even if the step was rather huge in your own mind. People already know you and want to work with you.
Getting the first couple of projects via old connections should be a relatively easy thing to do. You just need to reconnect with the most prominent clients and check what is feasible in terms of short-term collaboration.
But of course, this only works if you have a good reputation, haven’t burned (m)any bridges, and so on. You get the point. Your reputation in the local circles should do your sales for you. The only uncertainty at the beginning would be timing.
Perhaps, at the start, you might have to settle for not-so-great deals and your involvement in projects would be prone to negotiations for years to come, but that’s the offline game for you. That is how it works.
Nonetheless, the offline world is always bound to the local economy, so, in the long run, you might start to see some limitations to your business and have the need to grow outside your hometown.
Freelance sites
Freelance sites are a standard for doing freelance work these days. So, why not jump in, right? It’s a great idea – but only if you have a reasonable approach that makes you unique. Why? Because it is 2022 and many of the freelance sites have been around for over a decade by now!
And it’s not only the platforms that are now old, but it’s also some of the senior freelancers, your competitors, who have perfectly fine-tuned profiles, massive track records of millions of dollars of earnings, all the knowledge of how the platform works, etc.
You might be thinking about how you could possibly beat them… It would be an uphill battle for anyone.
As loads of freelancers in different career stages have been asking me about how to get jobs online, there are lots of general principles that you should consider. Most of them relate to communication by text chat which is the usual way to get initial contact with a potential client. Nail the first couple of lines, and you have a chance of getting your first job!
You should also avoid the common bottlenecks such as:
- Looking desperate, submissive, or just plain incompetent
- Listing all skills (you think) you have
- Not specializing in a specific clientele
- Appearing too grateful
- Not having a unique selling point
There are millions of other freelancers over there. How would you survive the battle?
Joining a freelance site without a plan in 2022 is like fighting an uphill battle against all kinds of hostile creatures that look very intimidating.
Fortunately, depending on your career stage, you can pull a couple of trump cards out of your sleeve that gives you a fighting chance in the battle of global competition.
Starting online as a young professional
Not having much to show is an obvious bottleneck to anyone, but when that comes with a non-existing work history in your resume and in the track record of a freelance site, the combination might look deadly.
But there is one thing you can do: create a portfolio of mockup work that looks great to a highly specific clientele. Building a profile that really speaks to your clientele is something anyone can do with proper guidance.
And here, I am not talking about a collection of generic logos that nobody has bought, but something specific enough to demonstrate your specialty. This way, you can hide your lack of perceived expertise and dazzle at least someone looking at your freelance profile.
You may have to go through proposal-writing principles with a senior freelancer to make sure you don’t spend months trying to get your first gig only because of not knowing how to attract clients with written text that contains your value proposition.
In fact, it is best to educate yourself quickly in the art and science of freelancing, because it is those skills that anyone can acquire with the right amount of determination. You can use your youth and enthusiasm to drive this process to go from zero to a pro really fast.
Some learn really well by reading, some learn only by doing. Doing things completely without guidance is a process you should avoid because that process doesn’t contain any kind of feedback mechanism. This is why millions of young freelancers quit before they even got started. After spending a lot of time and seeing very few dollars as income, anyone can do the math and get a day job.
And now the real danger. After spending a year as an unsuccessful freelancer, who wants to hire you? What have you got to show to your future employer other than endless trying? This is the position you do not want to get into: not succeeding as a freelancer, yet, having no chance of getting hired as an employee either. This is the limbo you must avoid at all cost!
This is why getting someone to hold your hand through the early stages is probably the best move you could make because anyone can imagine how fun it is to be in that limbo of no true opportunities one year later.
Starting online as a seasoned expert
One of the advantages for seasoned experts is exactly why I still like platforms like Upwork: the potential for building reputation and reaping the benefits of it is multiple times that of the offline game when you do it right.
Another interesting aspect of starting online at a late stage of your career is that you have the potential to race straight to the global top in a relatively short amount of time. Your challenges would only include:
- Defining the platform where your clients are present which depends on what you sell
- Figuring out how to present yourself online using a profile
- Nail your process of describing your value proposition in a short proposal
- Polishing your approach to convert clients during interviews
These are the adaptations you would need to do when going solo online because it is a different world out there compared to anything you have experienced before in your earlier career. But all this is a learning process that you can start, execute, and finish. Soon, preferably.
I’ve seen many senior professionals, even those who have done years of freelancing, getting stuck online because of not understanding those adaptations. The presentation of yourself online is everything, because of a simple fact: if your profile doesn’t look clickable, it won’t be clicked!
Be clickable. Figure out what the string you need to pull is.
Be sure to bring forth the massive body of expertise you have and your solid understanding of where you belong in the value chain. Use your knowledge of the industry gained during your entire career, think globally, and aim for the best-paying clients from the start. It is those companies who have a gap in the size of your offering in their businesses.
And the best part: As a solid professional, you don’t need to start from the bottom working for peanuts! You can go straight for coconuts! These 11 hacks might help you breach $0 earnings on any freelance site when you just get your approach right.
For those with strong academic backgrounds, there is good news too. Much of freelancing has similarities with doing your Ph.D., so your chances of getting started, getting it going, and going way over the bar is higher than most. I bet you can top most others in the speed of getting started as well as in rates as soon as your niche is selected!
The business plan your dog didn’t eat (yet)
As it should be evident now, either way, you must have a plan. Develop it. Are you going online or offline to start your freelancer journey? Where are your ideal clients located and how you can reach a big bunch of them efficiently? What exactly is your offering to them and how much is it worth?
As a seasoned professional, it is probably easier to use your connections and start offline. Then, you take it from there and start refining your approach for searching for new clients.
As a young professional, your plan needs to be solid to even have a chance either way… but perhaps online is more natural as you wouldn’t have a great starting point in the offline world anyway. Then, we start a losing battle if even the prize in the best case isn’t lucrative?
There’s no excuse for not having a business plan… regardless of your having a dog.
So, what counts as a business plan for a new freelancer? It doesn’t need to be complicated, actually. For a simple one-person business, a simple business plan will do.
Entrepreneur.com offers a very nice, common-sense, and simple way of thinking about business plans. And we can simplify it even further. As a freelancer, all you really need to plan your business is:
- Description of the business
- Description of the service
- Market analysis
- Competitive analysis
- Operations and management
- Financial components of your business plan
And you don’t even need to do anything more than make it clear to yourself what those elements of your business are.
In my case, my initial and very specific plan to go solo on Upwork in 2014 was this (following the above list point by point):
- My operation runs as a single-owner business that sells software development and innovation services to new software companies (startups).
- I sell software application development services for the Microsoft Kinect 3D sensor
- There are some Kinect development jobs on Upwork every now and then, many of them posted by startups, some by researchers, and a couple of design firms. (At the time of searching, 2 small ones below $1,000 and 5 medium size projects around $2,000-$10,000, if I recall right.)
- There are several other Kinect application developers, but all of them also offer many other software development services. So, becoming a highly specialized Kinect developer might result in much higher perceived expertise as seen by potential clients.
- The application development work is done solo with occasional help from other freelancers for manual testing and graphics/visuals production.
- The only recurring costs would be work outsourced to other freelancers (5.) and some software licenses. One-time costs include a powerful laptop and the Kinect sensor only.
Once this was clear, it was only a matter of time to find the perfect opportunity… and the rest is history.
How do I start a successful freelance business?
Don’t get me wrong, you don’t need to know everything and get it right from the start. Almost nobody gets it right like that. It might take some time to figure out how to find your clients at first, and it is perfectly OK to iterate!
The best trick is to run on multiple tracks as soon as you have something going. And in case trying things purely online, you might want to try several platforms, in the beginning, to see what freelance site works best for you. Or maybe social media works for you best. For inspiration, read Freelancer’s Sales Channels – 5 Proven Examples Other Than Freelance Sites.
In my case, I didn’t even bother to write it down as I knew my target clientele, I knew what I was offering, and I knew where to find them. To me, it was the efficiency of getting new clients that I was after, so I tried several sales channels. 3 out of 3 of my first sales channels worked out (old connections, physical events, and Upwork)! Then I could focus on the most efficient ones and be opportunistic with the others.
Start a freelance business in 2022… strong!
It’s possible, you can start strong even if you think the world is full of freelancers in 2022. And there are ways to get started online or offline, as a young professional or as an experienced expert.
But when trying offline as a young professional your chances are small purely because of the lack of connections and contacts. It is very hard to get a decent business going, i.e. do business that is clearly better than mere survival. It will take time to build both your competence and a business at the same time. Starting online with the correct approach might be faster to get something going.
For seasoned professionals, starting offline should be fairly easy, but perhaps a quite limited opportunity in the long run. On the other hand, starting online might feel strange, but there is a fair chance of making it to the global top in a relatively short time if you got your niche right.
Either way, I wish you the best of luck!
