Freelancing Mantra: Preparation is the Key

Namaste Freelancers and Friends, 

How have you been last week? Now that I have started posting once a week on a regular basis, I hope we can spend more time together in a discussion about various freelancing concepts and ideas. Kindly leave your comments below and let me know what you want to discuss about and I will definitely write about it. 

Today’s topic is preparation. Preparation is the key to any business and freelancing is no different. As a business owner, you need to prepare sufficiently for everything that you do. Freelancing is a business owned by you and you alone (well, in most cases, where you do not work with a team) and hence, you need to take care of all the various aspects of business all by yourself. That is a lot of work in itself. It can be overwhelming at times to too. 

However, if you are prepared for all these and prepared well, then it will be easier for you to handle everything easily. There are a lot of things a freelancer has to do, as a business owner. After all, it is her own business and she’s solely responsible for what she gets. We need to understand that as a freelancer business owner, more often than not, you would find yourself doing most of the office works ALONE! And this is why preparation becomes a key part of your freelancing business. Now, when we say preparation, what all is included? Well, the following list is not exhaustive, but it covers a major part of it, nonetheless. 

Mental preparation

First of all, you need to be prepared mentally while launching yourself in the freelancing marketplace. It would need a lot of determination, dedication, single-minded approach and giving up on many a thing that one liked, and all these are part of this mental preparation that we are talking about here. There would be a lot of ups and downs in the way forward and would be a lot of moments of success and failures as well. Remaining humble at moments of success and motivated at moments of failures is the key thing! Hence, it is most important that you prepare yourself for both successes as well as failures. Not everyone in freelancing become successful and similarly, not everyone face failure. Mental preparation is the key for going on for a long time.

Technical preparation

When I say technical preparation, I mean two things – skills & software. When entering the freelancing marketplace, you would need skills at the first place. You need to be a master of your skill and keep sharpening your axes all the time. Along with this, you must have the right software that helps you to use your skills and transform thatintoo digital products and services that you would sell in the marketplace. If you are a skilled graphics designer who creates & edits photos and you do not have the right software that you would want to do that, you will not be able to create anything and sell. Right? This is why, you need to be prepared technically. You need to master your skills, learn new skills and have updated software to deliver those as well.

Financial preparation

Many of the freelancers raise eyebrows when I talk about this topic – financial preparation. “If I could be prepared financially, why would I be working so hard as a freelancer?” Well, this is one question that comes to everyone’s mind. If you closely look at the freelancing business that you would want to kickstart, you need to be prepared financially. This is one of the top requirements. Let me make it easier to understand with an example. If you are a student and you are starting off with your freelancing business, more often than less, you will have your parents providing for your food and lodging. So, you do not need to think about that. Maybe you can concentrate solely into passive ways of earning online and grow your business slowly and steadily. On the other hand, if you are a middle-aged woman with a family to take care of, you may not have this luxury. So, you need to first take care of this and then move on with your dreams. You cannot devote all your time on passive sources of earning online. You would have to have some active source of earning and meet those demands first – whether through freelancing or through a day job. Having met those, you can think of moving ahead with investing your time & effort on passive sources of income. Hence, you need to be prepared before launching yourself on the freelancing marketplace.

Apart from these, you need to be prepared in a few other ways as well; like your family needs to be supportive, your friends and peers need to be patient and you need to stay in a place which is more suitable for working as a freelancer. These are pretty small things if you look at them as an outsider, but a freelancer would admit and recognize that these are not as small as they look like. You really need to be prepared and tension free regarding these things as well. Additional pressure from people and places around you can make your life stressful and ruin your freelancing career when exaggerated! 

That’s all for today. Do write to me and let me know what you feel about this. I would love to hear from you, as always. Do sign up with me for more such articles and posts in the future. Visit the Facebook page and do support us in every possible way you can. 

Cheers, mate!

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Thanks a lot,

The Indian Freelancer 

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