In last week’s column, I posed the question: Should you start a freelance business if your job search isn’t panning out? I answered the question with the ever-handy “It depends,” and provided some thoughts on what it might depend on.
This week, I want to start from the assumption that you have decided to go freelance, either permanently or for a window of time while you wait for the market to recover in your pocket of the world.
Regardless of your actual business model, you’ll almost certainly need business cards, a website, a LinkedIn profile, a cellphone (smartphone preferred), a laptop, an email account and reasonable Internet speed. Reliable transportation certainly wouldn’t hurt, as well as at least one go-to-meeting outfit.
Although brochures and fancy logos are fun, you can go a long way without those extras. But you can’t skip marketing and outreach altogether. And you certainly can’t skip sales.
Ah, now we have that line in the sand to consider. If you’re switching to freelance because you’re tired of the calls, letters and shallow networking involved in job search -- the sales aspect -- you’ll be disappointed to discover these tasks are also embedded in the freelance life.
So stop now and ask yourself: Am I willing to put on the rocket thrusters for this effort? Or am I just hoping some projects will come my way if I casually mention my name to a few people?
You already know what I’m going to say, but here goes: Do it for real, or don’t do it. You can’t afford to let months go by in halfhearted efforts because at the end of that time, you’ll still be unemployed and almost certainly un-contracted as well. What’s the point of that?
Assuming you’re going for it, here are five of my most golden methods for getting a freelance project. Whether the projects themselves actually support you will depend on your particular financials and on the price you’re able to command, but those are moot points unless you have projects to begin with, so here we go.
1. Subcontract to an established service as overload help. I did this as a career counselor in the early days of my business. It should work for everything from landscaping to graphic design, as long as you remember they are hiring you to serve as a team member, not as a competitor.
2. Offer your services to department heads at large companies. Every department gets in a bind occasionally covering staff vacations and overload work; you could be the relief valve for short-term assignments in your specialty area.
3. Become the outsourced department for a small business. Bookkeepers have done this for eons. It also works well for communications, IT services and other processes that small organizations can’t afford to maintain internally. But remember: You need to be cheaper or better than the larger services or there will be limited reason to take a risk on you.
4. Build volume by offering a low-cost service to a broad audience. As a writer who frequently profiles lawyers, I keep meaning to offer personality-filled bios for their websites at $100 a pop. I’m not getting around to it though, so that idea’s up for grabs – and there are a lot of lawyers out there.
5. Find an underserved market and serve them. In my business, that has meant giving job search workshops in rural areas where the offerings are sparse but the need is great. What is the underserved market in your field of business?
With slight adjustments, most of these ideas will work for most freelance services. Conversely, none of these ideas will work if you don’t communicate them to your potential customers. I call that sales, but if that word makes you hyperventilate, you can call it outreach, or customer service, because it certainly is a service to tell someone you have a solution to their problem and then deliver it on time and on budget.
To get your second and third and all other contracts, you’ll need to build referrals by doing a good job. But to get the first one? You need to knock on doors and make calls. That’s the only thing that will work in a reasonable time frame.
Luckily, it does work. I absolutely promise you: If you directly contact enough people, you will be invited to make a pitch, and those pitches will turn into contracts. You just have to promise yourself one thing: You won’t stop until you get a contract, no matter what, because the first contract is the tallest hurdle, and everything else gets easier after that. I promise.
Amy Lindgren owns Prototype Career Service, a career consulting firm in St. Paul, Minn. She can be reached at alindgren@prototypecareerservice.com or at 626 Armstrong Ave., St. Paul, MN 55102.
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