Treating your freelance biz like a client

The #1 issue I see in most (if not all) freelancers…

It can feel nearly impossible to work ON your business, especially when you are booked on projects.

When you have active client projects… all marketing goes out the window.

Then when the job is over, the scrambling begins. Or more realistically, after the job is over, you take some days off because you're exhausted and a little anxious about even thinking about starting to find new work.

Can I propose a better way of thinking about being freelance?

TREAT YOUR BUSINESS LIKE A CLIENT

Imagine for a moment that you hire someone to be in charge of bringing in new client projects. You've got a good feeling about them, so you let them do their thing. There's a project you're on and it's going well. All feels good in your world. As the project wraps, you get a nice emotional boost sending that sweet, sweet invoice.

It's been a while since you've heard from your employee who's generating new business for you. "They're probably busy taking calls and making deals," you think to yourself.

But after a couple weeks, concern turns to frustration and you ask them directly, "I don't see any new projects coming in. What have you been doing?"

They respond with a long list of intentions and a much smaller list of tasks finished. They posted once on LinkedIn a few weeks ago. They meant to reach out to some past clients, but got busy. They have a list of potential clients, but got nervous that their emails would come across pushy, so they decided to wait till later... when they might feel more confident. Mostly, they just checked their email, scrolled Instagram, and watched some tutorials.

Tell me... would you want to fire them, like immediately?

If this imaginary employee's behavior feels any sort of familiar to what YOU'RE doing to get work... what would you do?

Would you fire you?

It's a funny question, right?

I think we give ourselves an easy out partly because we can't fire ourselves. No matter how poorly you take care of the business generating aspect of freelance, you're all you got. So nothing changes.

So start thinking of "business development" like a legit job that you've hired YOU to do.

If you hired someone to do this role, what daily, weekly, monthly tasks would you have them do? How would you check in to make sure they were doing them? How would you measure success?

The most successful students who go through +$25k learn to do this part really well. They are as on top of working on their business as they are working for clients.

Let’s do a better job of taking care of OUR BUSINESS as if it was a CLIENT.