Turning redundancy into freelance success
However, those five years have seen a great deal of trial and error, plenty of uncertainty and a fair amount of anxiety. So I thought I would share some of the lessons I"ve learned along the way, to make you own journey from redundancy to freelance success a little easier.Big changes
Some people know their redundancy is coming; for others, it comes out of the blue. But even if you"re expecting it, redundancy comes as a shock. And it brings a number of major, very sudden changes to your life.
The first, and most obvious one is loss of income. This can be a major source of stress. Money worries put pressure on you to act quickly, even though it may be better to take time to make the right decision. If you don"t have savings to live on, consider some kind of casual work to keep your finances ๒˜ticking over" while you lay the foundations of a freelance life.
The second big change is the shift to an unscheduled life. Whereas you"ve been used to the daily rhythm of 9๒5, and the weekly rhythm of five days on, two days off, you"re now much freer to organise your own time. Get used to it; effective time management is one of the most important skills of the successful freelancer.
Finally, redundancy takes away the structure, friendship and reassurance provided by a job. And it"s this that hits most people the hardest าญ๒ in most cases, harder even than the loss of financial security.
Losses to gains
Although many people complain about their jobs, most rely on them to some degree. Filling a named role, with set responsibilities, gives a sense of solidity, structure and reassurance. Salaried positions provide a clear sense of what needs to be done in order to satisfy superiors and ๒˜get on" in an organisation. Day-to-day work can provide absorbing tasks, challenging problems and the reward of achievement. Employees depend on the social networks provided by the workplace, which in most cases are supportive to work tasks and help to relieve stress. They also look to their career to give shape and meaning to the long-term narrative of their lives.
When all these things are taken away, many people feel a deep sense of loss. That sense of loss can be made worse by dwelling on the circumstances of your redundancy. Although it"s the post, not the person, that is made redundant, it"s very hard not to interpret redundancy as a personal rejection. You were part of a ๒˜family" who then took the decision to get rid of you. You were wanted, and now you"re not. Your work was valuable, and now it"s surplus to requirements.
This type of thinking needs to be nipped in the bud. Redundancies are business decisions; nothing more, nothing less. Remind yourself of that whenever you start wondering why particular individuals have acted as they did.
Shift from dwelling on loss to focusing on what you"ve gained. There were probably things you didn"t like about your job ๒ now you have the chance to create something better. You"ve been given a spur to action and the chance to make fresh decisions about the direction of your life. You"ve got time that you can use to plan your future ๒ or just do things you"ve been neglecting, like keeping fit, seeing family or pursuing a hobby. It"s time to remember that life isn"t just about ๒˜getting and spending".
At the same time, start to reconsider whether the ๒˜benefits" of employment are really what you want, since this is important if you"re considering freelancing. In terms of career, can you deal with an unstructured, undirected working life that may not ๒˜develop" or ๒˜progress" in a predictable, controllable way? On the social side, are you ready for a very different social network ๒ perhaps much more ๒˜virtual" than the one in your workplace? And when it comes to daily tasks and projects, how do you feel about setting your own tasks and goals? Financially, can you deal with an income that"s variable and uncertain, yet more secure in its way than dependence on a salaried position?
Self help
Soon after my own redundancy, I started reading ๒˜self-help" literature for the first time. I"d previously been disdainful of the whole genre, but now it felt like I was ready for it. No longer defined by a job, judged by a boss or motivated by a career, I needed something to ๒˜fill the gap" ๒ a new way of thinking about myself and the world that would give me the mental tools to move forward.
Make no mistake: the mindset of the freelancer is utterly different from that of the employee. You"re not just a worker who happens to be outside the organisation. The freelance mindset is (or should be) independent, self-directed and self-reliant; many employees are the exact opposite, looking to their company, boss or colleagues for cues. Employees are part of a tribe; freelancers are out on their own and need to be mentally tough. They need self-belief, a positive self-image and the ability to motivate themselves.
These aren"t attributes you"re born with; they are skills that have to be learned. Most of us carry around a rag-bag collection of attitudes and beliefs, some helpful and some unhelpful, mostly picked up in our childhood. They are the ๒˜software" installed in the computers of our minds. Generally, people leave them unexamined and unchanged ๒ but major steps such as becoming a freelancer are much easier with the right mental tools. Self-help books such as Stephen R. Covey"s The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, Robert T. Kiyosaki"s Rich Dad Poor Dad and Paul McKenna"s Change Your Life in Seven Days can help you develop those tools.
It may be that just reading those titles made you cringe with embarrassment. Remember, you don"t have to agree with every word to get something out of these books. They don"t have to become your Bible ๒ just take what you want, or need, from each one and discard the rest. It may be that some ideas aren"t useful now, but may be in the future. If nothing else, you might come across some new, challenging perspectives that help you see things differently.
Design your job
Now you"ve got your head in the right place, it"s time to consider how your freelance work might look.
If you"re anything like me, you"ll find it difficult to think outside the box of your recent employment ๒ at least in the early stages. As an editor for publishing houses, the only freelance career I could envisage was an out-of-house version of my in-house role. The reality has been very different, combining skills I learned in-house, things I"ve learned since and stuff I just picked up at the ๒˜university of life".
To get new ideas on what you could do, you need to mix it up. Make a list of all your skills ๒า not just the bullet points on your job description, but literally everything you know how to do. Go right back to childhood, and include hobbies, interests, out-of-work activities and all your jobs ๒า not just the ones that fit the arc of your former ๒˜career".
Maybe you spent some time as a homemaker. That taught you about budgeting, planning and self-discipline. Or maybe you worked in a shop ๒ so you learned about face-to-face communication and grace under pressure. No matter what it was, get it all down on paper. It"s all relevant.
Remember to include ๒˜meta" skills. not just those that were explicitly part of your job. For example, you might have worked as an architect in a small firm. Obviously, that developed your architecture skills. But it also taught you about the particular concerns of running and managing a smaller business ๒ cost control, client liaison, team cohesion and hundreds of other things. All that is valuable experience.
Now, without any time pressure, start to bring these elements together into a job. Don"t worry if that job can"t be given a name that you, or anyone else, would recognise. Just create the role that would be perfect for you ๒ the best possible way to use all the skills you"ve got. It might not be achievable in the real world, but it"s a great target to aim for. And if you don"t decide what constitutes your ideal job, nobody else is going to.
Roles and labels
Don"t be afraid to take on a new label, even if it seems aspirational or even outright fantasy. It wasn"t until I"d been freelancing for a few years that I plucked up the courage to describe myself as a copywriter, although that"s definitely the term that most business people would use to describe my skills ๒า even on the very first day I started freelancing. Very few business people outside publishing care about the distinction between a writer, a sub-editor, an editor and a proofreader. They just need someone to sort out the words. So I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by moving straight to using the most commercially forthright role description, instead of attempting to impose my existing job title on the freelance market.
Remember: if you say you can do it, you can do it. People will presume you have the skills you claim to, unless you give them a reason to think otherwise. So if you know you can do something, even though your actual experience of it is thin, make it part of your offer. There"s no reason to sell yourself short by restricting your vocational range.
Your first clients
Now you have a sense of what you can do as a freelance, you can start to think about who you might do it for. Your thoughts will naturally tend towards firms like your former employer, and perhaps even your former employer themselves. Although companies theoretically make redundancies when the post is completely superfluous, in practice nearly every redundancy needs a gap that can be most readily filled by its previous occupant. If you"re offered work by your alma mater, it can be very difficult to turn it down. However, accepting is a double-edged sword.
On the plus side, you get a head start in building up the volume of work you need. You also get to work with a client you know very well, and for whom you can probably deliver a lot of value. Presumably, you can also be fairly confident of getting paid too. The downside is continued dependence on your former workplace, in a number of ways ๒ financially, socially and intellectually. Building a career as a freelance means striking out on your own, depending on yourself to bring in work and developing a unique worldview that reflects your unique experience. Preserving ties with your old workmates can restrict your growth in all these dimensions. So even if you decide that you do need to accept work from your old firm, you should at least be aware of the drawbacks and try to compensate for them by pushing for new clients, new contacts and new types of work.
Who could your new clients be? It"s a question that only you can answer, but the key is to cast the net as widely as possible. Don"t restrict yourself to companies that are similar to your old firm. Just as you considered all the ways in which your existing skills could be rearranged to form a new freelance job, so you can shuffle the elements of your new value proposition to throw up new ideas for clients.
Your rates
Setting rates is one of the most difficult things a freelance has to do. And it"s a problem that never goes away. Even after several years as a freelance, chances are you"ll still be finding it difficult to quote on the same basis for every client, or take the same negotiating stance across the board. Expectations on price vary wildly from client to client, so it"s very difficult to take a consistent stance. However, you need to start somewhere, which means setting up some sort of rates tariff before you start.
One of the most obvious places to start is your old job. Don"t. There may be little or no relation between what you earned as an employee and what the freelance equivalent (or near-equivalent) can earn. Because freelances have expenses (computers, travel, accountants) that employees don"t, there"s an expectation that they need to charge a little more ๒า or there should be. But that"s not all. The old saying about salaries is that employees do as little as they can to avoid being sacked, while employers pay as little as they can to stop people leaving. There"s more than a little truth in that, and it means that your salary may have been more to do with your employer"s perspectives than the value you were actually delivering. Whatever ๒ that"s all over for you now. But you do need to get a sense of what you can charge going forward.
The salary mindset might push you towards a daily or hourly rate for your services. Many people, using the salary as a baseline, might calculate their previous daily rate and try to increase it. That"s OK, but set your standards high. There"s really no need to tie yourself to a salary scale that may have been completely arbitrary, ad hoc or badly thought out in the first place.
Another way ๒ a better way, in my opinion ๒า is to charge by the project. This allows you to charge rates that reflect the value you"re delivering. For example, as a freelance copywriter, someone might ask me to write a high-profile advert, or they might just ask me to edit an internal document. While both are important, the approaches are going to be very different. The ad campaign might take one or two days of serious thought, followed by just a few hours" writing. The editing requires no forethought, but might take four days to complete. You can already see how troublesome an hourly rate is going to be. Better to take a view on how much value the client places on each project and charge accordingly. You don"t want to get into thorny discussions with a client of how long it takes you to do a particular task.
Flexibility is important with pricing. Clients and budgets differ, and your personal circumstances vary. At the outset, you might be willing to take a hit on price in order to build up a portfolio. That"s fine ๒ but it"s something you offer, not something clients demand. Don"t let anyone take advantage of you on the basis of ๒˜you"re starting out" or ๒˜lots of work in the pipeline" ๒ the client is talking to you, and they want you to do the project, so you bring value to the table. At other times, you might be a bit quiet, so you want to put in a price that all but guarantees you"ll be doing the work. When you"re busier, prices might be less compromising.
Your future
So there you have it. You"ve designed a role, identified clients and set prices. Now all you have to do is the wok. But as a former salaried employee, you already know you can deliver. Provided you can handle all the baggage that comes with freelancing too, you"re well on the way to a flexible, varied and highly fulfilling working life. Good luck!
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