You want to go full-time with your freelancing but you just don’t have it yet. You know that you want to do your new work all of the time. You can see yourself being a field expert. You want to go all the way. You just know that right now is the best time. Should you give up? Should you keep on waiting? What should you do?
I believe in not giving up until you’ve reached your full potential. There’s nothing wrong with switching gears or trying your hand at something new. I just don’t believe in giving up because you’re not seeing instant results. I feel that you should keep on going until you truly know if your goal is attainable or if you should chase after a new goal.
Below are the five steps that all new freelancers should follow if they want to go full-time in the near future:
Build up your savings.
Savings are key when starting any sort of a business. You need to be able to cover your expenses. I don’t believe in carelessly recommending that you quit your job to start a business full-time until you have the savings buffer. If you want to go full-time in the next year or so you need to start saving up your money so that you’ll be comfortable in case you experience any lean months at first.
I don’t want to throw out any percentages here. I already wrote about what you need to do before you quit your job. This article will guide you in the right direction if you want to be fully self-employed.
Increase your rate.
When the time is right you need to increase your rate. You can’t go all the way if you never increase your rate to increase your income. You don’t want to be at the same level forever. Many of us consider starting an online business with the idea of going full-time in a reasonable amount of time.
How can you increase your rate? You kindly tell the client that you would like to continue the relationship but that you need to increase your pay for it to be worth your time. You need to be ready to show results, back your work up, and believe in yourself. If you don’t believe that you’re worth the new rate then you won’t get it.
If your current level of work won’t sustain a raise, then you ned to test out business ideas until you find something that works.
Track your progress.
Tracking your progress is important because you need to see what’s working and what’s wasting your time. A simple analysis of an average day can help you figure out where your time is going.
You’re likely going to find that the clients that pay you the least, cost you the most amount of stress. As you start tracking your progress you might have to let go off a few clients, search for new clients, and work on ways to reduce your expenses. This is the beauty of tracking what you’re doing.
Broaden what you offer.
I hinted at this point earlier. After a while you’ll notice that you just need to offer high level work because there are different types of entrepreneurship. There’s only so much income that you can generate from lower level work.
The beauty of going after higher value work is that you can charge more and be more in demand. You’ll never get to be full-time if you position yourself at the same level.
Outsource what you can.
If you want to increase your speed of growth, you’re going to have to spend some money. You can outsource time consuming tasks to free up more time in your schedule. You can outsource what you’re not good at (blog design work) and focus on what you’re going at (helping others). This way you’ll likely reach your goal of being full-time much quicker than performing every single mundane task on your own.
That’s how you can pick up the pace and plan towards going full-time with your side business. What are you going to do once you’ve gone through the steps of starting your online business?