Freelance Transformation

You've made the leap to freelancing, you have clients, you're making money, and everything is going good... until taxes come due. In this episode, Raj Bhaskar, founder of Hurdlr, gives a crash course on how to navigate taxes as a freelancer.

Raj talks about how to manage your freelancing finances, and especially, figuring out your deductions and making your that you are compliant with the tax regulations in your country.

Disclaimer: Everybody’s situation is different, and of course, different places have different laws. So before implementing anything in this episode, SPEAK TO AN ACCOUNTANT. Seriously.

http://www.freelancetransformation.com/episode70

Quitting your job to freelance doesn’t have to mean a step backwards in pay. Today’s guest, Matt Olpinski freelanced for years on the side, while going to school and later working for a great agency. But at one point, Matt hit a cross-roads and realized that the opportunity to go freelance full-time was bigger than the opportunity to continue his employment career.

Since then, business has taken off and Matt’s freelance clients have even included American Express. And he’s turned down full-time employment offers from the likes of Uber, Tiffany & Co, and even Ogilvy and Mather. And did I mention that he’s still in his mid twenties?

How did it all happen? Matt applied consistent effort to the right areas of his business, like web presence, networking, and positioning.

http://freelancetransformation.com/episode69

Companies are constantly presenting pitches to stakeholders and potential clients, or presenting at conferences as keynotes and internally to show the progress of projects. Yet there is so little consideration for the presentation itself, which means that there is an expensive problem of effectively communicating their story and ideas. That's where Nolan steps in.

Nolan Haims is in the business of visual communications: he helps people communicate with fewer words. What that often means in practice is creating very effective presentation decks in PowerPoint, Prezi, and other presentation tools, or training his client’s employees to do the same. But it's not just about making the slides pretty, it is about designing the content to tell a story, which is why this is not so much about technical work, but about consulting.

http://www.freelancetransformation.com/episode68

Jane Portman started out as another designer on Odesk charging $20-$30 per hour for small projects. But when her first son was born, her priorities changed and she realized that she could be doing much more to sell herself and earn a higher income. So she decided to start targeting clients in the United States from her home in Russia and focused in on UI/UX.

Jane shares the story of her transition into consulting and provides wonderful examples of how she positioned herself as an authority in UI/UX. She also shares a remarkable wealth of resources to help others make the same transition.

http://www.freelancetransformation.com/episode67

Kate Kordsmeier built an amazing freelance writing career straight out of college. Kate is a food and travel writer who has been published in over 100 publications, gets to travel to cool places, eat fancy foods, and most importantly, is great proof that being a freelance writer doesn’t have to mean spending years carving out an existence and living as a starving artist.

Kate breaks down how she got started and built up her freelancing business, what her lifestyle looks like as a freelance writer, how she juggles her projects and stays organized, and details what actions you can take to start now.

http://freelancetransformation.com/episode66

Whether you choose to build an agency or be a solo entrepreneur, you will need clients, and if you want to grow, you will need to figure out systems to find and close big clients. Jason Swenk has mastered the process of finding clients, working with them to develop a proposal and win the project. He did this as an agency owner himself for 12 years, working with big clients like Porsche, AT&T, and Home Depot. After he sold his agency, he has been consulting and helping digital agency owners figure out their strategies to build and scale their agencies.

Jason shares the secrets on how to specialize, find brands, reach out to targeted companies, turn research into proposals, and close the deal. Jason learned all these secrets by having to figure it out on the go while scaling his agency, and shares them so you don't have to make the same mistakes and go through the same stresses.

http://www.freelancetransformation.com/episode65

In productized consulting, you package up your services and offer the same set of services to all your clients. So rather than customizing every project for a client, you instead offer a set menu of services with standard pricing for each service. Of course, each project will be different since each client is different, but the processes and the systems are the same. This approach allows you to scale quickly and find security in monthly payments, avoiding the feast and famine cycle.

Matthew Newton, founder of Tourism Tiger, has built a great example of a productized consulting business. Mat knew from the start that he wanted to scale his business, so he set it up with scaling in mind. He tells us why he chose productized consulting rather than building an agency, how he chose a niche, how he markets his business and finds clients, and how he is growing the business.

http://www.freelancetransformation.com/episode64

A frequent and common mistake that freelancers tend to make when approaching a project is to price out a project based on the specifications that the client gave them. This approach places you as a commodity, yet another skilled professional offering some commodity technical skill at some price. This approach doesn't necessarily address what the client really needs, after all, the client isn't a technical expert, that's your job. Your expertise is finding a way to solve the client's problem.

Ben Seigel will share the process of how you can assess a client's needs and even get paid to do it. Ben is the author of Website Planning for Small Business and owner of Versa Studio, a web design agency.

http://www.freelancetransformation.com/episode63

Getting paid and seeing that bank account go up is a very rewarding part of freelancing. But are your finances on track? Are you leaving time for both billable and non-billable work such as marketing, bookkeeping, billing, and so on? Do you know if you are going to be financial solvent three months down the road?

In today's episode, Ryan Battles, expert on freelancer finances and co-founder of Harpoon, shares how freelancers keep their finances on track, the big financial mistakes to avoid, which billing methods work best for freelancers, and where money fits into life.

http://freelancetransformation.com/episode62

The vast majority of guests on Freelance Transformation either work remotely or have their own offices as agency owners. In this episode, we explore a different way to freelance and speak with Prescott Perez-Fox who has worked primarily on-site, that is, actually inside the client's building.

Prescott Perez-Fox started his freelancing career a bit differently than the typical path by working with a recruitment agency to find on-site freelance gigs at agencies and corporations that needed a designer for a few weeks at a time. As a result, Prescott had the opportunity to work on projects for some major brands and earn a diverse range of experience.

In this episode of Freelance Transformation, Prescott shares what it's been like working in these different environments and the lessons he's taken from each company's culture and workflow. We also explore the recruiter-based model of finding clients, the good, the bad, and when it might make sense to work with a recruiter.

http://www.freelancetransformation.com/episode61