What is the real truth of freelancing?
I want you to understand the three things before you jump into freelancing before you try to make it your career. Let’s start with the first point and that is the fact that you are your boss. You can set your own rules, you can set your working hours. You have the choice to go on a vacation. It is entirely up to you. The good thing is that there is no cap on the amount of money you can earn. The bad thing is that you always have to hurry. You always have to make sure you improve. You should always make sure that you are getting new customers because customers don’t stay here forever. You must take the initiative. You have to make a real effort every day. When you’re self-employed, you need to make sure you take care of your expenses first and make sure to go after new clients also at the same time. It’s really important that you have an online community, that you have some sort of online presence. This is also a very important part.
Being your boss is a good thing. At the same time, the bad part is that you have to decide how much you want to work. You have to decide how much you want to relax. This can be very stressful for many people because they just don’t want to take the pressure. Often you will feel like there are no customers and you are just at home. You don’t have anyone to pay you this month. Also, there will be months when you have a lot of work to do. So it’s going to be a very erratic schedule which can happen with freelancing. Just keep this point in mind.
The second point that I want you all to understand is that there is no such thing as security. Again, as I said, clients don’t stay forever and what you need to do is constantly approach new clients and see if you can work for them. There is no security means you will not receive a paycheck every month. And in the beginning, you won’t get anything, you’ll be underpaid, and you’ll spend a lot of time doing free labour. Maybe at the beginning, it’s very stressful if you don’t get a salary after each one. Lots of people complain that I worked so hard and only got Rs.10,000 for the whole month. It’s a bad thing. But what they don’t understand is that it’s an exponential curve. When you freelance, you learn new things and as you learn new things, you can ask for more. So, the point is the fact that there is no social security for the self-employed. There are ways to protect yourself. By taking out insurance to ensure that your bills will be paid when you run out of money because that is sure to happen. Just keep this thing in mind.
The 3rd point is the fact that you must understand your value. How much should you charge per hour or how much should you charge for value-based pricing? You need to understand. Because if you don’t understand your worth, it doesn’t matter if you work for a new start-up or a Fortune 500 company, they will always take advantage of you. It is therefore very important that you always keep this in mind. But the question is how you understand yourself. I’ll give you an example of what you can do. Just grab a pen and write down each of your expenses. Once you’ve done that you can start to understand what you’re spending your money on and then it becomes very easy for you to start thinking about budgeting and then you can see how much you want to save. How much more do you want to earn? If you don’t have a cap, you will always feel unfulfilled as a freelancer.
I am only revising what I have told you in this article. First, we talked about being your boss. It is a blessing and a curse at the same time. Second, we talked about the fact that there is no such thing as security, that’s also an important point to keep in mind, and the third point to remember is the fact that you have to evaluate yourself.
