Off-Brand Self-Employement
The quickest way to start working for yourself is to continue working for someone else.
Self-employment Week: 83
When you think about freelancing, 3 words that undoubtedly come to mind are:
Unstable
Uncertain
Unstructured
It’s how a lot of people describe this way of working.
But I’ve been freelancing full-time for almost 2 years and I haven’t ever been able to relate to that. My experience of working for myself hasn’t been unstable, uncertain, or unstructured so far.
And that is primarily because of the kind of freelancing I did. Long-term contract work.
When we read stuff about freelancing, watch videos, or consume courses, we learn about getting more clients, charging more with each client, having a pipeline, or a lead generation system and think those are ESSENTIAL to life as a freelancer.
They haven’t been essential for me, for a long time.
I stumbled across 1 client. And that’s all I needed to be self-employed.
But that doesn’t sound very successful to say. No one’s selling a course on ‘how to stay self-employed with 1 client’. I didn’t even talk about it that much. Even now, I’ve deleted these words a few times and have had to force myself to put them out there.
Throughout the past year, I’ve got asked multiple times “Oh you just have 1 client?” or “Have you gotten any more clients?”
Because somehow working with more clients was more successful than working with fewer?
I mean, of course, I see the benefit of having 3-5 clients. It’s less risky in case you lose 1-2.
That exact scenario played out for me very recently too.
But as soon as I lost one, many more appeared.
And I’ve always believed more clients would always be there if I needed to find them and so I’m not going to hold on to more out of fear.
If someone asked you if you’d prefer to have more clients or fewer, I can guess that most would choose the former. But it’s not objectively the better scenario.
In the past, I have had times where I’ve been working with 5-6 clients at a time. Not only did I have less time to live my life, but I was also so much more anxious, drained, and stressed. And I made significantly less money with 5 clients than I did with 1.
I really just didn’t enjoy that life. I felt stretched across too many things, always running through a checklist in my mind about all the pending tasks for each one.
And the thought of having to get systems and project management tools just to handle my many clients didn’t make me wanna do it either.
A lot of that gets solved when you have only 1 or 2 long-term clients.
There’s not that much admin work, there’s only actual work.
For over a year, I didn’t have to worry about getting new clients.
And it’s been great.
While I transition out of that and structure my work differently now to be able to work with a lot more people in the coming year (maybe not at once), I just wanted to write a little something about what might just be the easiest and bare minimum way of being able to call yourself self-employed.
What does long-term contract work look like?
If you’re a service provider (which most freelancers are), there are 2 ways you can offer your services:
If you’re a graphic designer you can either do project-based one-off work such as making thumbnails for an online course.
Or you can work with a Youtuber and make thumbnails for all their videos 2 times/week plus all the social posts that they repurpose those videos into.If you’re a copywriter, you can either work on website copy for its launch or you can work as a contractor within a small boutique agency that has 10 clients who need tons of copy all year round.
If you’re a video editor, you can either make channel trailers or edit weekly videos.
If you’re a learning experience manager (like me), you can either work on one course or work with an education business that’s making courses year-long.
Here’s the part that starts to look unsuccessful to people: Being a long-term contractor means you technically feel more like an employee than an entrepreneur.
You might be required to attend team meetings.
To give weekly updates.
To have to wait on others to finish some of your deliverables.
Get paid at the end of a month, usually a fixed amount.
Be forced to end the working relationship whenever the client’s business deems fit.
But you can also:
Reasonably reject any meeting invite that you aren’t up for.
Have a team to chat with once a week.
Decide how much you want to be paid. Propose commissions or incentives when you’d like to make more.
End the relationship with a week’s notice.
Work with as many people as you want.
Work from anywhere or whenever you want.
Not to mention that you can work without worrying.
Worrying about how you’re going to make money once a project is over.
Worrying about how to plan your life financially.
Worrying about not knowing what your month might look like.
I’m not sharing this to convince anyone that the way freelancers mostly operate sucks and that my way has been better. I would never give advice on freelancing.
I’m sharing this because something has worked for me for almost 2 years.
Because something helped me live exactly the life I want to live.
Because something helped me work on really cool stuff and learn so many things.
And I would never want to discount any of that just because it doesn’t look as successful as some other things might.
Tons of people want to work for themselves and in my opinion, long-term contract work is the easiest and quickest way to accomplish that.
So if something is still holding you back, I’d like to ask you,
Do you want to feel successful or do you want to feel self-employed?
Banger as always!
One piece of feedback - breaking each sentence ended up with me scrolling a ton and it didn't make for a good reading experience. I would prefer reading as paragraphs but ultimately it's up to you!