What To Do Before You Take Your Business On The Road
Posted March 13, 2008 in Lifestyle 9 Comments »
Isn’t it fun to work from home? You have your main computer, access to the internet, phone and all that. All you need is right there in your home office, you don’t have to worry about anything and you even take some things for granted.
When you go to Starbucks it’s not because you need to, it’s because you want to, because you enjoy it. You won’t lose a client if the local coffee shop doesn’t have free internet access.
But some of us are not full-time freelancers, some have day jobs that require travel, some are musicians, and some have a thing for airports (?).
Some of you already know I’m a musician, and I will eventually have to pack my bags and go on tour with my band. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately because I still want to freelance, I enjoy it – and when you’re on tour, you have some time to kill.
Whether you’re a musician, or you want to travel the world simply because it’s fun, what are the things you should you do before you leave?
Don’t Leave Your Clients In The Dark
While traveling it is very possible you will not be able to reply to e-mails right away and sometimes it may even take a day or two. First thing to do before you leave: tell your clients (they most likely helped finance that trip).
Let your current and regular clients know you plan you taking your business on the road, be honest. You may think it’s going to be transparent for them and they don’t need to know for as long as you deliver, but sooner or later you’ll miss a deadline because the closest Starbucks is a hundred miles away – you miss a deadline, you lose a client. Not fun.
Don’t get offended if some of your clients decide to give their business to someone else. They have deadlines too.
Outsource As Much As Possible
Say you’re like a lot of freelancers and work between 8 and 14 hours a day, or more… do you really think you’ll be able to get 14 hours of work down while on the plane or in transit? Not likely. You have to gradually cut down your hours and outsource some of your work. I went from 14-16 hours a day to around 8-10.
I still have a long way to go, but I’m getting there, my goal is to cut this down to around 3-5 hours per day or less and still earn enough.
Send some design work to a friend, someone who you know will deliver and keep clients happy. Chances are your friend will return the favor one day. Also consider hiring a virtual assistant.
Streams Of Passive Income – Automation
I know too many freelancers who work crazy hours and yet don’t have any passive income streams. There are tons of ways to do it:
- Write an ebook
- Build a membership site
- Sell premium WordPress themes
- Sell images on iStockPhoto and other similar sites
- Find advertisers for your site(s)
There are a lot of other things you can do though, please share your thoughts and ideas in the comment section below. :)
Work Offline
Why not set things up so you can work offline in case you can’t access the internet for a couple of days? Try it at home first, disconnect your internet for just a day or two. Can you live without it for even just 1 day? If you didn’t get any work done, and you got hundreds of e-mail in your inbox the next day maybe it’s about time you hire a virtual assistant.
- Save your e-mail replies as drafts and send them when you can access the internet.
- Make sure you have everything you may need on your laptop so you can work offline.
What Would You Do?
In case traveling the world isn’t your thing, you can still outsource some of your work and build passive income streams. It won’t hurt. :)
What else should you do before you take your business on the road? Any tips or advices you can share with us would be greatly appreciated. Are you a traveling freelancer?
Jon
About the author: Jon Phillips is a full-time freelancer, designer and blogger, he loves WordPress and plays guitar in a heavy act. He's also the founder of Freelance Folder. Oh and he'd be pleased if you would follow him on Twitter. :)
-
Let’s face it, most of us freelancers do what we do in order to have the potential to work and…
[Read More...] -
As a freelancer, we are always looking for clients. Whether we are in freelancing for the joy and freedom of…
[Read More...]
The Unlimited Freelancer is Now Only $19
Unleash the true potential of your business. Get The Unlimited Freelancer and start transforming your freelance business,
now only $19.
Try searching "Getting Clients" or "Productivity"
FreelanceCommunity
Free Resource: Massive Web UI and Button Set
This is a free photoshop set provided by MediaLoot with hundreds of free buttons, boxes, and other useful web elements.5 Fresh and Useful jQuery Plugins Were Born in November 2009
In November 2009, 5 jQuery plugins were born that are new and useful for web designers. Read this post to learn more.How Well Do You Understand CSS Positioning?
The css position property seems easy to grasp, but it works a little differently than it appears on the surface.
Free Report
Sign up for our product discount list to get a free copy of Why Some Freelancers Thrive and Others Barely Survive. You can unsubscribe anytime.
Popular Articles
- SEO Techniques All Top Websites Should Use
- When a Client Can't Afford You: Why It's Still Better to Bid High
- How To Stop Scrambling For Clients And Get A Steady Stream Of Paying Gigs
- A Simple Way To Stop Clients From Rejecting Your Proposals
- 3 Reasons Your Rates Are Still Low (And How To Start Raising Them)
9 Comments
James Chartrand - Men with Pens
March 13th, 2008 at 5:12 pmI had a recent impending fishing trip at a lodge way up north. No phones, no cells, no signals, no connections… Just the bush and the ice and the fish underneath. Awesome.
But then comes downtime. And I want to write. I don’t want to drink beer until I’m lying in my piss in a snowbank. I want to sit by the window and watch the evening fall while I work.
Then reality hits: Can I manage for a week with no connection? How will the business run? Where will the income come from (because “work” really meant working on a novel, not the $$ kind of work).
That got me to thinking a little bit more about how to make a business run without me – and still live comfortably. I’ll be curious to see the results of your cutbacks, Jon, so let me know if you make it rich in business while rockin’ on in Brazil ;)
(I still think that no Canadian should be allowed to leave the country until *I* can go to Brazil, but hey.)
Tom Ross
March 13th, 2008 at 9:13 pmGreat tips there. I especially like the tip about saving your offline email replies as drafts. I love to experiment with passive income as well, it provides you with a bit of security.
Jon Phillips
March 13th, 2008 at 10:10 pm@James: ahh Brazil! hehe hey it’s not confirmed yet :)
@Tom: it’s always nice to have a little money coming in every month and not have to work too much for it (well it takes a lot of work and time to build passive streams of income, but once it’s done, sit back and enjoy :) )
Kotsengkuba
March 13th, 2008 at 11:55 pmone of the pitfalls in being a full-time freelancer is that other’s tend to loose focus thinking that they’re in control of their time having no need for bundy clocks or some sorts.
on the other hand, free lancers (especially those using the blog as medium) seem to let themselves be confined in the four corners of their rooms in front of their computers and neglect the needs for some socialization or even going out for some fresh air once in a while.
for photobloggers, some of them forget to just let go of atleast a single picture-perfect opporunity to just let the wnderful moment pass by and be wowed by the magnificense of a scene or of nature.
sometimes, we all need to go out and smell the flowers.
hank
March 14th, 2008 at 10:55 amI’m not a freelancer but one of the things I do to keep my inbox in order is to set filters up to automatically move the things that don’t need IMMEDIATE attention to another folder (newsletters, RSS feeds, etc) and then the stuff that starts with “RE:” goes to the top of my inbox, because clearly (Well, there is that .001% chance it is spam) they’re responding to something I sent earlier.
Andy
March 26th, 2008 at 7:50 pmA few things that freelancers should do before they take their laptop on the road:
1. Encrypt the disk! You likely have something on there that’s going to be damaging to a client if it got out there in the wild (like passwords to their web hosting account). Encrypting the disk — using software that now comes with most operating systems — is an easy way to keep a thief from examining your disk without booting and logging into your laptop.
2. Take it a step further and get a USB security key for your laptop. I use SecuriKey, but there are others out there and they keep people from booting/using your laptop without the key present. Even on client sites, I use this to protect me in case my laptop somehow walks away.
3. If your laptop is a bit underpowered and you need to access remote servers for your work, try to get a VPN set up so that your communications are secure between your laptop and your servers. If your servers are all remote-hosted anyway, make sure you have SSH and SFTP/FTP over SSL working to provide a way to communicate securely with your servers.
Good post, Jon.
Jon Phillips
March 26th, 2008 at 7:58 pm@all, thanks for the comments and suggestions, really appreciated :)
@Andy, really good points! These are good even if you don’t take your laptop on the road too
brad
March 27th, 2008 at 10:46 amJon,
I just went on a two-week vacation and did many of the things you listed in this article. Most importantly I think was not leaving clients in the dark. When they know you are gone if gives you a little cushion in your reply-time. Then, just be ready to work a lot when you get back to make up for it.
My other suggestion would be to make sure you bring the things you personally need to work with you. For instance, I can’t work without my Wacom tablet, and though it took up a lot more space in the luggage, I wouldn’t have been able to do much without it.
Thanks for the great article!
Trackbacks