Working on Your Business, Not Just in It
Posted August 31, 2010 in Inspiration, Productivity
When you’re a freelancer, you often find yourself doing several jobs. You may design, develop, write, manage, bill, consult and answer the phone. Unfortunately, while we’re busy taking care of all these roles in the day-to-day management of our business, we forget to step back and take a look at the long term.
Working on the business may not seem important when you’ve got ten active clients and six projects due this week, however it’s an important task you need to take care of, if you ever plan on growing your business (whether you plan to stay a single person business or not).
What exactly is working on your business versus working in it? Working in your business means taking care of the daily things, the clients, the billing, and the actual work. Working on your business, however, deals with stepping back and seeing how your business can improve, where you want your business to go, and so on. You should aim to try and work on your business, at least for a few hours every month.
Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can work on your business.
How Can Your Business Improve?
Do you have goals you want to reach while freelancing? Have you reached those or did you make them and then forget about them? It’s easy to lose sight of those beginning of the year goals we make for our business, since we tend to aim for the stars and then get wrapped up in actual work.
Think of a goal you’d like to reach. For example, if you’d like to make $100,000 this year, don’t just write that down and forget about it. Turn it into action steps and break it up into smaller goals that you can actually attain:
- So, if you want to make $100,000 this year, that’s $8,333 you need to make a month.
- That means you need to aim to make $2,083 a week.
- If you charge $100 an hour, that means you need to bill 21 hours a week.
See how breaking down our seemingly impossible goal of making $100,000 in a year, doesn’t seem too big when we find out we only need to bill 21 hours a week to make it?
Improving your business, though, doesn’t always just deal with money. One of the ways I wanted to improve my business was to make myself more productive. I did that by moving my office to happier place in the house, one I didn’t dread coming to and had plenty of light (and therefore, less headaches).
Take a step back from working every once in a while to take an objective look at your business and ask yourself, what can I do to improve it?
Where Do You Want Your Business to Go?
When freelancers first start out, they don’t normally have any sort of target market or clientele they go after. Beginning freelancers often spread their work and proposals to as many potential clients as they can, in order to get enough work to stay afloat.
While this works in the beginning, it doesn’t often for long. You should have a certain amount of knowledge of the kind of work your client is in, and that’s often hard to do if you cater to everyone and everything. This is why I recommend specializing your services, your clients or both.
Not only is specializing important, but where do you want your business to go? Do you always want to offer those Flash services, or would you rather be doing iPhone apps?
It’s important to step back and think of the perfect client with the perfect project. What kind of project and client would that be? Where are they in real life? How can you get there?
If you fail to think about these kinds of business questions, you’ll often find yourself with the crappiest clients and projects, even after years of freelancing. You can’t get awesome projects until you know just what those awesome projects are to you.
I did this after only a few months of freelancing and it really set the pace for being scheduled up for weeks, even months at a time. Knowing who it is you want to work with and what kind of work you want to do, unconsciously helps you move yourself in that direction.
Do I Want to Grow?
I’ve known for forever that I don’t want to grow in terms of size. I don’t eventually want to rent a big office and hire employees and turn into a real agency. But, you might want this for yourself.
Like everything else, this is another question that will determine exactly how you work day-to-day. What are your dreams? Do you want to become an agency or do you like working by yourself out of your home office?
It was once my dream to buy one of those 100-year-old multi-level buildings in downtown Nashville, where I could live on the top floor and run an agency in the bottom. But, then I worked for several agencies and realized how dysfunctional it was, plus how becoming an owner of one of them means you no longer get to do the work you love, but instead are busy with running the company. That wasn’t something I wanted to do.
If you plan on staying a simple freelancer, there are others way to grow. You can grow your professional network and avoid hiring employees, but team up with other freelancers who do what you don’t and pass work between each other. I’ve teamed up with several designers and back-end programmers to help me get jobs I would normally turn down. Each person manages the client during their work, so I don’t have to play project manager either!
So take a step back and think about where you want your business to be in five years, ten years and beyond.
Your Thoughts
What are some of the ways you’ve worked on your business to improve it?
Image by Travis Isaacs
Related posts:
- Working With Other Freelancers to Expand Your Business
- Ten Tips To Stay Motivated — Even When You Really Don’t Feel Like Working
- Working Under Fire — Do You Like Stress, or Not?
- The Perils Of Working At Night – Should You Rent A Space?
- 3 Simple Productivity Hacks For Web-Working Freelancers
About the author: Amber is a freelancer with over 10 years of experience and specializes in clean, semantic and valid HTML5, CSS3 and Wordpress development. She also writes a web development blog at www.amberweinberg.com and just launched a web app for developers at www.codesnipp.it.
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42 Comments
The Freelance Geek
August 31st, 2010 at 8:39 amI agree completely! It’s so easy to neglect the long game when your stuck in the middle of the daily madness. I set goals every month and review at the end. Helps me stay on track. I keep the goals to a healthy mix of short, medium and long.
Eddie Garrison
August 31st, 2010 at 8:49 amGreat piece Travis and I couldn’t agree with you more. A lot of people are more concerned with having all the clients all the time. Which is a good thing don’t get me wrong, but not at the expense of your business.
Again nice piece and I enjoyed the read.
Jordan Walker
August 31st, 2010 at 8:59 amThanks Amber for the thought provoking article on ways to work on your business. I am currently redeveloping my website with progressive enhancements using HTML5 and CSS3. As a programmer it seems as though learning a new language or abstract pattern would deem worthy of business building…
funny pranks
August 31st, 2010 at 10:37 amMy goal is 5-10k/month now i’m at 2-3k/month
And i want to keap it a 1 person gig and also
My ultimate goal is to own several websites that earn good … and mentain them …
huw rowlands
August 31st, 2010 at 12:53 pmI am hoping to go freelance sometime soon and this article has given me some good advice, before i make the mistakes!
Thanks.
Kavyansh
August 31st, 2010 at 2:24 pmExcellent flow of idea and very well explained. Yes, this story somehow explains what I was year back. Now I am less into actual development, more into get client … get projects. Pass over to peer freelancer and act as manager. Which has helped me increase monthly income increased by 150 % and I can focus more on skills and clients I want to look for.
Thanks for wonderful explaination.
Jen
August 31st, 2010 at 4:46 pmAmber, you have mentioned some good points. Your breakdown of how to make $100,000 a year is great and can be applied towards anything. You have to have the BIG goal. But in order to achieve that goal, you have to set up little goals to figure out what exactly you need to do to get there. Not only will it help you get there, but it will make the task of earning $100,000/year (or whatever the BIG goal is) much less daunting than it sounds.
Well done, as usual. Thanks for sharing!
Stephanie
August 31st, 2010 at 8:34 pmGreat post Amber! It’s a nice way of looking at your business’ current state from a different perspective. And I like the way you broke down $100,000! If only I could charge $100 per hour without potential clients running away from me. XD
TLC
September 1st, 2010 at 12:28 amI woke up a few days before Christmas last year and realized: oh, crap! I have nothing in the pipeline! I’d been so overwhelmed by my biggest client all I could do was survive. But they’d just hired a full-timer so I knew things would slow down. And I had no backup.
And so began an intense networking & updating plan. My work has paid off. A business card swap in February led to my partner and I winning a bid today that could earn us nearly $20,000 over the next year.
It’s so important to survive in the short term, but to thrive, think long term!
Web design portfolio
September 1st, 2010 at 4:42 amgreat article. but who can get away with $100/hour? ouch!
Ameet
September 1st, 2010 at 5:52 amwhat i do is every afternoon after lunch i take a power nap and during that nap i think where i want to reach i simply visualise everything how it will look and all that stuff..this keeps me charged up for my main goal :)…hope this trick may help to someone
ameet
melissa
September 1st, 2010 at 9:21 amLove this article, Amber. It’s one of the first I’ve read where the freelancer DIDNT want to grow and hire employees, which is where I’ve been for years. I don’t want to have to manage people, worry about HR issues, and I certainly didn’t want to swap management chores for designing. Thanks for all the tips and insight!
Freelance FactFile
September 1st, 2010 at 10:40 amI’m good at setting goals and breaking them down into the different activities I need to do in order to get there. But I’m even better at filing that list somewhere and not looking at it very often. This post has galvanised me into action. Thanks Amber!
Jared
September 1st, 2010 at 11:54 amI agree with most of what you’re saying here and it’s important to remember the reason you freelance, just like you said. We often forget that we started freelancing because we wanted to be able to spend more time with our family or we just didn’t want to work for “the man” anymore. It’s easy to forget and keeping your goals on you is a great way to remember. I put them in my phone, because lets face, its practically growing to me. So anytime I feel I’m headed in the wrong direction, I pull out the phone and read over my goals.
As for the $$ thing, I kinda agree but I have an addition to that. While its important to set the goal of making a certain amount, say $100,000, why even set your hourly rate? If you set your hourly rate, you actually end up making less the better you get. So for instance, I once had an hourly rate of $65. But as I got better and faster at what I do, suddenly I’m only able to bill for a certain amount of hours and thus my profit margin goes down. But what if you set your rates not hourly, but by project? So if I used to build a custom wordpress site for $2000, then my expertise improves and my credibility improves, I can bump up the rate to say $3000 or whatever. Then not only am I getting things done faster, I’m actually get way more per hour for it. Something to think about.
And one last thing. I would HIGHLY suggest “The Wealthy Freelancer” to anyone wanting to go out on their own or those already there. It’s an outstanding book about time management, getting the clients you want, and the work you want. There’s so much great info in there and where I got my previous argument on the hourly rate from.
Anyway, that’s my 2 cents, take it or leave it. Best of luck to all you freelancers, it’s a glorious life. :D
Kristin White
September 1st, 2010 at 4:54 pmThank you so much for this article. I am just starting out and caught in that “need to do anything I can” phase. I appreciate how you represented some topics for me to think about as I plan.
Lautaro B.
September 1st, 2010 at 7:00 pmI loved this self improvement / goals reminder / wake up call article!.. Most of the time I keep getting sucked up by my freelance projects and my part time job (Yes i do keep one since its hard to freelance in my country).
U just gave me a reason to spend a few extra hours each week, and I say a week cause i really like to keep track of my goals and strategies each week!.
thank you for this piece!. I loved it!
inspirationfeed
September 1st, 2010 at 8:42 pmGreat break down, im a visual person so things like that help alot!
Michelle | Bleeding Espresso
September 2nd, 2010 at 3:22 pmExcellent, excellent advice and so clearly laid out. Thank you :)
Connor Bringas
September 2nd, 2010 at 6:32 pmI can imagine it being extremely hard to manage and figure out long term goals and productivity etc. Its easy to get caught up in day to day business looking at the overall picture becomes extremely difficult!
Sarah-Kate
September 6th, 2010 at 1:15 amOne of the exciting things about freelancing is being taken seriously about what you love and that is why it’s so important to take your business seriously. Having a conscious plan to realise your dreams is great advice. I especially like the concept of sharing work with peers. I’ll be doing it when I get to that stage.
Duncan
September 21st, 2010 at 2:47 amThanks for the article, some good advice there.
One of the ways that we’re trying to improve our business is by consolidation all our documentation into the cloud. With a mix of Google Apps and DropBox, most of our client-related documentation is now on-line and stored off-site. We’re doing this for three reasons:
(1) Backup. If our local information goes down, we have spares. This has been very useful on several occasions.
(2) Location Independence. We’re working towards being able to work from anywhere and we can access our documentation from anywhere.
(3) Compatability. The business currently uses PC and Mac, we’re even got an Ubuntu set-up in the workshop and so having stuff stored in a central location makes it easier to access it from any computer.
cheers,
Duncan
Lisa
September 24th, 2010 at 11:09 pmGreat article! When we get so busy in projects it’s easy to lose site of the big picture. Thanks for the reminder !
vinay
September 29th, 2010 at 3:38 amreally nice post… Good advice for us to follow…
Thanks for share…
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