My Freelance Life: A Year of highs, lows and lessons learned pt.1

It hasn’t been a good couple of weeks and yesterday was the worst. I won’t get into details (keeping my rant for offline). What I will say is that I’ve been coming to terms with a few personal things which gave me time to reflect on the past year. The perfect place to start was with my business. I am writing this to help you not make the same mistakes I did or at least notice them ahead of time so you can nip them the butt quickly.

One of the biggest lessons I learned in the SistaSense Circle is that I needed to identify the problems and find a solution, then look at what’s working and figure out how to duplicate it. This is exactly what I did the other day. I am going to start with the things I did wrong in my business and how I started to correct them.

At the beginning of the year I didn’t have a clear focus of my target market. I was just open to work with anyone. At some point I settled on a target but it was the wrong one for me. So I had go back and look at every client I had and see who I have been work with. The majority of my work came from Bloggers and Soloprenurs (97% women). I got one problem down, now on to the next one – being Jane of all Trades.

I was offering every service I knew how to do, even though I didn’t enjoy doing some of them. Every time I did one of those things, I kept telling myself I am not doing it again but I still continued. Not any more. I recently revamp the services I provide giving focus on more of the kind of work I love to do. Also knowing that I have the power to say no and being okay with it is a great feeling.

Next up is Marketing. You must always be marketing, never ever stop. You may become busy at some point. When that time come just start a waiting list. If someone doesn’t want to wait, know that is okay, just move on and focus on the work you do have. This is a good reason why you need some policies in place. Another hole I had to plug in my business. Not only are my policies now visible on the site but it will also be include on my invoices.

Speaking of invoices, now let’s talk about money. I had three holes to plug here – setting monthly goals, depending on one client for my main source of income, and prices. Setting & track your monthly goals will help you see your progress and pinpoint when and if you aren’t doing so good. Then when tax time comes part of the work will be done. Outright ( a bookkeeping service I use) send me a weekly email about how much money I made. I take that number and plug it into a spreadsheet to see if I am hitting my mark (Thank you LaShanda for teaching about money markers). I also decided to seek different sources of income for my design business, especially since I recently lost client that provided a bulk of my income. Ouch! That was a big wake up call. Last but not least I set up a new pricing structure. I came wait to start rolling all of my new things out before the New Year.

My year wasn’t totally bad….

Stay tune tomorrow for part two – the good stuff.