Freelancing may be the employment model of the future. Companies are regularly looking to outsiders to fill specific needs and skillsets, and savvy freelancers are earning a living working with a mix of small to large scale businesses to earn that living.
Freelancers, working as small business owners, have figured out some secrets to success; that many business owners may want to consider or learn from. You. may be part of a large organization or a mom-and-pop shop. Either way, these five ideas can help you find success by emulating the best of freelancing:
Idea 1: Work hour flexibility.
In The Work Revolution, author Julie Clow examines how people do their best work. Some people are early risers and do their best work before the rest of the world starts. Others are night owls who thrive in the wee hours of the morning, fueled. Maybe these people are on a natural high because they love being awake while the rest of the world sleeps.
Just because corporations decided on doing work 9-5 doesn’t mean that this is when employees are most productive.
Freelancers work when they choose to work, which is most likely their most productive hours of the day. Some companies have started allowing flex scheduling with employees working 4 days a week for 10 hours; leaving the employee 3 days off a week. Most businesses are learning they have catching up to do if they want peak performance from all employees.
Idea 2: Work location flexibility.
Coffee shops, home offices, airplanes, co-working spaces, and rented office spaces are all options for the best places to work. Now, employees are beginning to see that a gray cubicle may not be the best work condition for their teams.
Freelancers work wherever they choose and typically choose the place where they work best. That great workplace may be a coffee shop, home office, co-working space, or a combination of the three.
Businesses with multiple employees may find great results putting their teams in a central home office, or they may see even better success allowing employees to work where they find the best productivity.
Idea 3: Each client is an asset… or not.
Freelancers can’t count on a steady paycheck every other Friday like most office workers. Instead, each client is an asset, an opportunity, and a valued piece of the business. A client becomes very personal to a freelancer, so the freelancer takes prodigious care of each client they wish to maintain.
Large businesses can treat clients like commodities, and offer shoddy service and results. Focusing on perfecting the customer experience like freelancers and giving every client a personal touch can help solidify and strengthen client relationships for large businesses.
On the flip side, freelancers are quick to identify difficult clients that suck up more time and resources than they are paying for, and they know when to raise rates or let clients go that are not ideal for their personal business model.
Idea 4: Don’t neglect your billing.
Invoicing and payments replace paychecks for freelancers, so they can’t afford to forget an invoice or wait for payments that take months to show up. Freelancers are nimble and use online systems, like the ones offered by Due.com, to get paid easily and quickly.
Large businesses and small businesses alike can learn from the billing systems freelancers use to get paid. While fancy, homegrown systems can do the job, new evolutions in invoicing and electronic payments are revolutionizing how freelancers get paid, and other businesses are checking out how the freelancer is streamlining the payment business and being paid more quickly. Options of automatic billing and receivership are becoming the norm even for larger businesses.
Idea 5: Budget for a dry spell.
Just as freelancers look at each client as an income source, they know that clients and projects come and go, and there are good months and bad months. Additionally, this means freelancers need bigger emergency funds and savings for a string of low-income months.
Startups and all businesses know that the percentages of those that will open and close every day are high — roughly 50% of all businesses fail within four years. Consequently, many of those failures can be traced to a lack of capital and changing economic conditions.
Also, freelancers know that there are bad times ahead eventually, and should always maintain savings for those times. The savings for a rainy day doesn’t just have to be garnered by the freelancer, cash to carry one through the tough times can be maintained personally, and can be budgeted into all other businesses, big and small.
