As a freelancer it’s almost impossible to achieve any significant level of success by hiding behind your desk all the time.
You need to build a network of people to connect with, a group of business friends who can help and support you. (And you’ll do the same for them.)
Build a strong enough network, and you’ll find you no longer have to spend much time looking for work, because most of your work will come to you through referrals, via your network.
Who are these magical people?
In last week’s post I talked about my first big speaking engagement. (If you didn’t read that post, I suggest you do so now. Today’s post is a follow-up or continuation of that one).
That invitation to speak came my way out of the blue. It was a lucky break. And when invited to speak, I said yes.
That was my first talk in front of a large crowd – about 700 people, as I recall – and I can’t say it was my best presentation. Actually, it was my worst. But it was good enough to get me invited back to another conference, and then another, and then another.
For a few years I was speaking on an almost monthly basis. My copywriting and consulting business grew out of those events. That is how I met my best prospects, and how I got to make a good first impression. It’s also how I got to meet and network with a lot of smart people in this industry.
I’m not a big fan of paperwork. I don’t think most other freelancers much like it either.
But beyond the paperwork I have to do, there are one or two other things I choose to do.
Foremost among my voluntary pieces of paperwork is a spreadsheet that shows my income, month by month.
I fill in the months that have passed, and also make projections for three months to come.
Projections? That sounds like something that “real” companies do, not freelancers.
Well, I treat my freelance business like a real company. And I think you should too.
Here is what I do with my spreadsheet.
As a coach I encourage my clients to look a few years into the future, decide on where they want their business to go, and then figure out how to get there.
Set the goal, figure out some way-points and then work steadily until you have achieved the outcome you want.
It’s good advice, because most small businesses and freelancers don’t plan enough. They stumble forward, month by month, hoping things will work out.
So yes, I think every freelancer and entrepreneur should have a plan and stick to it.
Now for the kicker – Your biggest successes probably won’t be part of your plan at all.
Viagra was not the result of a plan to create the world’s greatest erectile dysfunction drug. Researchers were actually working on a blood pressure pill when they came across a rather interesting side-effect. Viagra’s discovery was accidental.
Alexander Fleming didn’t discover penicillin, the world’s first antibiotic, by spending years looking for a drug that killed bacteria. He discovered it because of an accidental cross-contamination between two petri dishes in his laboratory. He screwed up, and found penicillin as a result.
Making the decision to work with a coach is a huge leap of faith.
First you have to choose a coach to work with, without really knowing him or her all that well.
Then you have to pay them money.
And all this without really knowing in advance whether the coaching process will work for you.
It’s a leap of faith.
I have made that leap myself, when I worked with a coach about 6 years ago. Like anyone else, I didn’t really know what to expect.
I don’t much like putting myself in someone else’s hands. And I’m not someone who is quick to trust someone I don’t know very well. But to give that coaching engagement a fair shot, I had to let go of my usual constraints and allow him to do his work.
As it turned out, that experience was transformational for me, and I’ll always be grateful. (Thank you Alan Allard!)
Recently I have been writing and speaking about the power of loving your message.
Simply put, it isn’t easy to promote yourself when you try to sell your services on the basis of the sum of your expertise and experience. You’ll never feel totally confident, because you’ll always know that your knowledge is incomplete and that other people know more than you do.
But when you have a message you love, everything changes. Instead of trying to promote yourself, or the sum of your knowledge, you promote your message.
My message, back in the late 1990s, was “writing for the web is different”. It was a new and exciting message back then, and nobody else was saying it. And it built me a business before I had any kind of expertise or experience in writing for the web.
People hired me because they loved my message.
Now…to give you an idea of what loving your message looks and sounds like, check out the video below.