This week marks a year since I landed my first freelancing gig.
It feels great to have the first year – with all its ups and downs – under my belt, to still have that first gig, and to have made enough revenue to have to register for self-assessment for tax (funny thing to get excited about, I know, but the measures of success are diverse, and past me set the bar pretty low). So, whilst I’m in this reflective mood, here are three key learnings from my first milestone year of freelancing:
1. Be picky about who you work with
I had some near misses in terms of potential clients when I first started out freelancing. Enquirers who, with the benefit of hindsight, would probably have been an immense drain on my resources compared to the experience gained or revenue earned. I say near misses but, even though I didn’t realise it at the time, I probably didn’t get those gigs because I was super clear about my parameters from the start – my rates, my availability, the services I offered; I wasn’t prepared to compromise to suit someone else, because that meant they weren’t the right fit for my business.
It’s a shift in mindset, because we’re conditioned to think that as a service provider, you need to convince the client they should work with you, but it’s actually just as important that you want to work with them, specifically, too.
You don’t have to be BFFs with your clients, but you should be able to respect them and the way they do business. AND they should show respect in their treatment of you from the first point of contact, because that’s indicative of how they will treat your working relationship going forward.
2. Don’t let social media consume you
We’re probably all guilty of spending too much time on social media, and of bowing to its fickle demands from time to time. Whether that’s jumping on the latest viral trend, or prioritising content creation over all other tasks, it’s easy to lose perspective when we’re constantly being told how important our social media presence is to the success of our business.
Early in my freelancing days, I remember hurriedly putting together a post to go up the same day, because I wanted to remain ‘consistent’. I didn’t really have the time to do the post justice; I wanted to quickly throw something together just so I could show up and not be forgotten about by Instagram’s merciless algorithm. In my haste, I overlooked a pretty blatant typo in the graphic. Another virtual assistant (whom I tremendously admired and looked up to, by the way) messaged me kindly to let me know, because she knew that if it had been her, she would have wanted a heads-up too – and thank goodness she did, before EVERYBODY saw it.
Because here’s the kicker: it was a post on common copy errors. Grammar mistakes. I was pontificating on the importance of attention to detail, and had myself made the silliest of typos.
My lesson that day was to never let social media ‘rules’ force me to sacrifice quality for the sake of quantity. Socials can be a powerful marketing tool, but use them in a way that suits you and your business and don’t bow to pressures to prioritise them above all other types of marketing.
Social media should be a servant, not a master.
3. It’s OK to pivot
There’s a huge amount of pressure to find your niche, to target your marketing, and to offer brilliantly unique services that nobody else does. But when you’re starting out in your business, it can be a big ask to have all this figured out. Realistically, most freelancers start out offering a wider range of services to a variety of types of clients. Or, they may start out focusing their business in one particular niche, only to find out that they actually have talents or inclinations in another direction.
I started off as a general virtual assistant offering far more services than I do now. I knew there were lots of things I could do, but until I really got started, I didn’t know what I most enjoyed doing and what I was best at doing. Over time, I’ve niched down to a few core services, because I know now what I love doing—which has a direct correlation with what I excel at.
Does that mean I failed in my early days, whilst I was figuring out where to focus my marketing efforts? Did I waste all that time I spent describing various services on my website, only to delete those sections later on? Absolutely not. It’s all part of the process. None of us are born fully-fledged business strategists.
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Those have been my big insights over my first, bewildering, educational, fantastic year as a freelancer. And I know that’s just the beginning, and that there’s so much more to learn and discover.
What did you learn when you first started freelancing?