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Working as a freelancer is the kind of thing that many people with an entrepreneurial spirit find themselves doing — and it’s not too hard to see why.
As a freelancer, you are your own boss and are essentially contracting your services out to a number of different clients. You set your own working hours, you stay accountable to yourself, and you can build an entire business and brand around who you are and what you are doing.
Freelancing naturally comes with challenges and potential setbacks, too. For anyone who wants to really “make it” as a freelancer, and to have the best possible experience of the freelancer’s life, there are certain things that they just have to get right.
Here are some things that every freelancer needs to get right.
Great time management
For traditional “in-house” office workers, the working day is automatically pretty well structured by default, and there are plenty of accountability mechanisms in place that ensure that work gets done as and when it should.
Freelancers, however, find themselves in a very different situation. Being their own bosses, and having no oversight in the form of managers coming to check up on them, freelancers need to be very well organized, and have great time management, in order to stay properly on top of their projects.
If you don’t have these time management skills, you need to urgently acquire them, or else you should reconsider being a freelancer altogether.
Excellent financial management and investments
As a freelancer, there’s a good chance that your payments come in at irregular intervals and that you will have more money coming in at certain periods of the year than at others.
It’s also likely that you will go through dry spells in your career, where there’s little if any work coming around, and you need to dip into your savings in order to keep the lights on until you get some more assignments or contracts.
For these reasons, excellent financial management is fundamentally important for the success of any freelancer. Not only is it important for you to manage your budget as effectively as possible, and to plan ahead for future expenses such as rent, but there’s also good reason for you to look at things like DiversyFund reviews, in order to investigate investment options.
A proactive attitude, constantly keeping an eye on the next opportunity
Freelancers naturally have to wear a number of different hats at once. Not only do they need to be their own managers and accountants, but they also need to be their own marketing and outreach departments.
By its very nature, freelance work tends to be the kind of thing that might dry up, and so it’s important for freelancers to keep looking for the next opportunity, and to keep reaching out, networking, and connecting with prospective clients.
This kind of proactive attitude is a must-have as an entrepreneur.
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